Musing delectably, he drew aside the crimson curtain from the window and beheld the same prospect that Rachel had beheld on her walk towards Friendly Street—­the obscurity of the park, the chain of lamps down the slope of Moorthorne Road, and the distant fires of industry still farther beyond, towards Toft End.  He had hated the foul, sordid, ragged prospects and vistas of the Five Towns when he came new to them from London, and he had continued to hate them.  They desolated him.  But to-night he thought of them sympathetically.  It was as if he was divining in them for the first time a recondite charm.  He remembered what an old citizen named Dain had said one evening at the Conservative Club:  “People may say what they choose about Bursley.  I’ve just returned from London and I tell thee I was glad to get back.  I like Bursley.”  A grotesque saying, he had thought, then.  Yet now he positively felt himself capable of sharing the sentiment.  Rachel in the kitchen, and the kitchen in town, and the town amid those scarred and smoking hillocks!...  Invisible phenomena!  Mysterious harmonies!  The influence of the night solaced and uplifted him and bestowed on him new faculties of perception.

At length, deciding, after characteristic procrastination, that he must really go to bed, he wound up his watch and put it on the dressing-table.  His pockets had to be emptied and his clothes hung or folded.  His fingers touched the notes in the left-hand outside pocket of his coat.  Not for one instant had the problem of the bank-notes been absent from his mind.  Throughout the conversation with Rachel, throughout the interval between her retirement and his own, throughout his meditations in the bedroom, he had not once escaped from the obsession of the bank-notes and their problem.  He knew now how the problem must be solved.  There was, after all, only one solution, and it was extremely simple.  He must put the notes back where he had found them, underneath the chair on the landing.  If advisable, he might rediscover them in the morning and surrender them immediately.  But they must not remain in his room during the night.  He must not examine them—­he must not look at them.

He approached the door quickly, lest he might never reach the door.  But he was somehow forced to halt at the wardrobe, to see if it had coat-holders.  It had one coat-holder....  His hand was on the door-knob.  He turned it with every species of precaution—­and it complained loudly in the still night.  The door opened with a terrible explosive noise of protest.  He gazed into the darkness of the landing, and presently, by the light from the bedroom, could distinguish the vague boundaries of it.  The chair, invisible, was on the left.  He opened the door wider to the nocturnal riddle of the house.  His hand clasped the notes in his pocket.  No sound!  He listened for the ticking of the lobby clock and could not catch it.  He listened more intently.  It was impossible that he should not hear the ticking of the lobby clock.  Was he dreaming?  Was he under some delusion?  Then it occurred to him that the lobby clock must have run down or otherwise stopped.  Clocks did stop....  And then his heart bounded and his flesh crept.  He had heard footsteps somewhere below.  Or were the footsteps merely in his imagination?