He fingered the letters. With one of them was a cheque, and it must go into the safe for the night. He would endorse it to-morrow. Never endorse a cheque till you paid it into the bank, for an endorsed cheque might be the prey of thieves. He bent down sideways to his safe with a certain pleasure. Her safe was upstairs in the bathroom. He would have to obtain her keys and open it and examine its contents. He took his own keys from his pocket, and, not very easily, unlocked his safe, and swung forward its door. The familiar act soothed him. The sublime spectacle of the safe, sole symbol of security in a world of perils, enheartened him. After all ...
Then he noticed that the silver bag was not precisely in its customary spot on the ledge over the nest of drawers. He started in alarm and clutched at the bag. It was not tied with his knot. He unloosed it and felt crumpled paper within it. "6d"! Elsie's clumsy hand-writing, which he knew so well from having seen it now and then on little lists of sales on the backs of envelopes! No! It was not the loss of sixpence that affected him. He could have borne that. What so profoundly, so formidably, shocked him was the fact that Elsie had surreptitiously taken his keys, rifled the safe, and returned the keys—and smiled on him and nursed him! There was no security at all in the world of perils. The foundations of faith had been destroyed. Elsie!
But in the agony of the crisis he did not forget his wife. He moaned aloud:
"What would Violet have thought? What would my poor Violet have thought of this?"
His splendid fortitude, his superhuman courage to recreate his existence over the ruins of it and to defy fate, were broken down. Life was bigger, more cruel, more awful than he had imagined.
XI
PRISON
"Joe," inquired Elsie, "where's your papers?"