He sat, a skeleton effigy with his too-large, bearded head, draped only in the aged nightshirt of his solitude, and, by I know not what disastrous processes of the mind, now shrank from, now turned towards the pieces of green cloth lying squat on the bed as though it had been a living thing. Then he began muttering about his ten five-pound notes. He gave them names, turning them into strange foreign money. There was more in the bank. Oh, there was more! But all the days he had kept them hidden—waiting for the thing to blow over! And how cheap he had bought that paper, and how well he thought to have hidden it; what a certain scheme against curious eyes! Those five flimsy papers between the leaves of such a book, and all those regular visits of the Force, regular as the month came round, and never such a thing as a loss before!
