And there was Louis staring like a fool at the open page of the petty-cash book, incriminating himself every instant.

“Hello!” said Louis, without looking round.  “What’s up?”

“What’s up?” Horrocleave scowled.  “What d’ye mean?”

“I thought you were limping just the least bit in the world,” said Louis, whose tact was instinctive and indestructible.

“Oh, that!” said Horrocleave, as though nothing was farther from his mind than the peculiarity of his gait that morning.  He bit his lip.

“Slipped over something?” Louis suggested.

“Aye!” said Horrocleave, somewhat less ominously, and began to open his letters.

Louis saw that he had done well to feign ignorance of the sprain and to assume that Horrocleave had slipped, whereas in fact Horrocleave had put his foot through a piece of rotten wood.  Everybody in the works, upon pain of death, would have to pretend that the employer had merely slipped, and that the consequences were negligible.  Horrocleave had already nearly eaten an old man alive for the sin of asking whether he had hurt himself!

And he had not hurt himself because two days previously he had ferociously stopped the odd-man of the works from wasting his time in mending just that identical stair, and had asserted that the stair was in excellent condition.  Horrocleave, though Napoleonic by disposition, had a provincial mind, even a Five Towns mind.  He regarded as sheer loss any expenditure on repairs or renewals or the processes of cleansing.  His theory was that everything would “do” indefinitely.  He passed much of his time in making things “do.”  His confidence in the theory that things could indeed be made to “do” was usually justified, but the steps from the painting-shop—­a gimcrack ladder with hand-rail, attached somehow externally to a wall—­had at length betrayed it.  That the accident had happened to himself, and not to a lad balancing a plankful of art-lustre ware on one shoulder, was sheer luck.  And now the odd-man, with the surreptitious air of one engaged in a nefarious act, was putting a new tread on the stairs.  Thus devoutly are the Napoleonic served!

Horrocleave seemed to weary of his correspondence.

“By the by,” he said in a strange tone, “let’s have a look at that petty-cash book.”

Louis rose, and with all his charm, with all the elegance of a man intended by Nature for wealth and fashion instead of a slave on a foul pot-bank, gave up the book.  It was like giving up hope to the last vestige, like giving up the ghost.  He saw with horrible clearness that he had been deceiving himself, that Horrocleave’s ruthless eye could not fail to discern at the first glance all his neat dodges, such as additions of ten to the shillings, and even to the pounds here and there, and ingenious errors in carrying forward totals from the bottom of one page to the top of the next.  He began to speculate whether Horrocleave would be content merely to fling him out of the office, or whether he would prosecute.  Prosecution seemed much more in accordance with the Napoleonic temperament, and yet Louis could not, then, conceive himself the victim of a prosecution....  Anybody else, but not Louis Fores!