The Jolly Corner.................................................................................................................................................1

Henry James .............................................................................................................................................1

"EVERY ONE asks me what I 'think' of everything," said Spencer Brydon; "and I make answer as I

canbegging or dodging the question, putting them off with any nonsense. It wouldn't matter to any of them

really," he went on, "for, even were it possible to meet in that standanddeliver way so silly a demand on so

big a subject, my 'thoughts' would still be almost altogether about something that concerns only myself." He

was talking to Miss Staverton, with whom for a couple of months now he had availed himself of every

possible occasion to talk; this disposition and this resource, this comfort and support, as the situation in fact

presented itself, having promptly enough taken the first place in the considerable array of rather unattenuated

surprises attending his so strangely belated return to America. Everything was somehow a surprise; and that

might be natural when one had so long and so consistently neglected everything, taken pains to give surprises

so much margin for play. He had given them more than thirty yearsthirtythree, to be exact; and they now

seemed to him to have organised their performance quite on the scale of that license. He had been

twentythree on leaving New Yorkhe was fiftysix today: unless indeed he were to reckon as he had

sometimes, since his repatriation, found himself feeling; in which case he would have lived longer than is

often allotted to man. It would have taken a century, he repeatedly said to himself, and said also to Alice

Staverton, it would have taken a longer absence and a more averted mind than those even of which he had

been guilty, to pile up the differences, the newnesses, the queernesses, above all the bignesses, for the better

The great fact all the while however had been the incalculability; since he had supposed himself, from decade

to decade, to be allowing, and in the most liberal and intelligent manner, for brilliancy of change. He actually

saw that he had allowed for nothing; he missed what he would have been sure of finding, he found what he

would never have imagined. Proportions and values were upsidedown; the ugly things he had expected, the

ugly things of his far away youth, when he had too promptly waked up to a sense of the uglythese uncanny

phenomena placed him rather, as it happened, under the charm; whereas the "swagger" things, the modern,

the monstrous, the famous things, those he had more particularly, like thousands of ingenuous enquirers

every year, come over to see, were exactly his sources of dismay. They were as so many set traps for

displeasure, above all for reaction, of which his restless tread was constantly pressing the spring. It was

interesting, doubtless, the whole show, but it would have been too disconcerting hadn't a certain finer truth

saved the situation. He had distinctly not, in this steadier light, come over all for the monstrosities; he had

come, not only in the last analysis but quite on the face of the act, under an impulse with which they had

nothing to do. He had comeputting the thing pompouslyto look at his "property," which he had thus for

a third of a century not been within four thousand miles of; or, expressing it less sordidly, he had yielded to

the humour of seeing again his house on the jolly corner, as he usually, and quite fondly, described itthe

one in which he had first seen the light, in which various members of his family had lived and had died, in

which the holidays of his overschooled boyhood had been passed and the few social flowers of his chilled

adolescence gathered, and which, alienated then for so long a period, had, through the successive deaths of

his two brothers and the termination of old arrangements, come wholly into his hands. He was the owner of

another, not quite so "good"the jolly corner having been, from far back, superlatively extended and

consecrated; and the value of the pair represented his main capital, with an income consisting, in these later

years, of their respective rents which (thanks precisely to their original excellent type) had never been

depressingly low. He could live in "Europe," as he had been in the habit of living, on the product of these

flourishing New York leases, and all the better since, that of the second structure, the mere number in its long

row, having within a twelvemonth fallen in, renovation at a high advance had proved beautifully possible.

These were items of property indeed, but he had found himself since his arrival distinguishing more than ever

between them. The house within the street, two bristling blocks westward, was already in course of

reconstruction as a tall mass of flats; he had acceded, some time before, to overtures for this conversionin

which, now that it was going forward, it had been not the least of his astonishments to find himself able, on

the spot, and though without a previous ounce of such experience, to participate with a certain intelligence,

almost with a certain authority. He had lived his life with his back so turned to such concerns and his face

addressed to those of so different an order that he scarce knew what to make of this lively stir, in a

compartment of his mind never yet penetrated, of a capacity for business and a sense for construction. These

virtues, so common all round him now, had been dormant in his own organismwhere it might be said of

them perhaps that they had slept the sleep of the just. At present, in the splendid autumn weatherthe

autumn at least was a pure boon in the terrible placehe loafed about his "work" undeterred, secretly

agitated; not in the least "minding" that the whole proposition, as they said, was vulgar and sordid, and ready

to climb ladders, to walk the plank, to handle materials and look wise about them, to ask questions, in fine,

It amused, it verily quite charmed him; and, by the same stroke, it amused, and even more, Alice Staverton,

though perhaps charming her perceptibly less. She wasn't however going to be better off for it, as he

wasand so astonishingly much: nothing was now likely, he knew, ever to make her better off than she

found herself, in the afternoon of life, as the delicately frugal possessor and tenant of the small house in

Irving Place to which she had subtly managed to cling through her almost unbroken New York career. If he

knew the way to it now better than to any other address among the dreadful multiplied numberings which

seemed to him to reduce the whole place to some vast ledgerpage, overgrown, fantastic, of ruled and

crisscrossed lines and figuresif he had formed, for his consolation, that habit, it was really not a little

because of the charm of his having encountered and recognised, in the vast wilderness of the wholesale,

breaking through the mere gross generalisation of wealth and force and success, a small still scene where

items and shades, all delicate things, kept the sharpness of the notes of a high voice perfectly trained, and

where economy hung about like the scent of a garden. His old friend lived with one maid and herself dusted

her relics and trimmed her lamps and polished her silver; she stood off, in the awful modern crush, when she

could, but she sallied forth and did battle when the challenge was really to "spirit," the spirit she after all

confessed to, proudly and a little shyly, as to that of the better time, that of their common, their quite

faraway and antediluvian social period and order. She made use of the streetcars when need be, the terrible

things that people scrambled for as the panicstricken at sea scramble for the boats; she affronted,

inscrutably, under stress, all the public concussions and ordeals; and yet, with that slim mystifying grace of

her appearance, which defied you to say if she were a fair young woman who looked older through trouble, or

a fine smooth older one who looked young through successful indifference; with her precious reference,

above all, to memories and histories into which he could enter, she was as exquisite for him as some pale

pressed flower (a rarity to begin with), and, failing other sweetnesses, she was a sufficient reward of his

effort. They had communities of knowledge, "their" knowledge (this discriminating possessive was always on

her lips) of presences of the other age, presences all over laid, in his case, by the experience of a man and the

freedom of a wanderer, overlaid by pleasure, by infidelity, by passages of life that were strange and dim to

her, just by "Europe" in short, but still unobscured, still exposed and cherished, under that pious visitation of

She had come with him one day to see how his "apartmenthouse" was rising; he had helped her over gaps

and explained to her plans, and while they were there had happened to have, before her, a brief but lively

discussion with the man in charge, the representative of the buildingfirm that had undertaken his work. He

had found himself quite "standingup" to this personage over a failure on the latter's part to observe some

detail of one of their noted conditions, and had so lucidly urged his case that, besides ever so prettily flushing,

at the time, for sympathy in his triumph, she had afterwards said to him (though to a slightly greater effect of

irony) that he had clearly for too many years neglected a real gift. If he had but stayed at home he would have

anticipated the inventor of the skyscraper. If he had but stayed at home he would have discovered his genius

in time really to start some new variety of awful architectural hare and run it till it burrowed in a goldmine.

He was to remember these words, while the weeks elapsed, for the small silver ring they had sounded over

the queerest and deepest of his own lately most disguised and most muffled vibrations. It had begun to be

present to him after the first fortnight, it had broken out with the oddest abruptness, this particular wanton

wonderment: it met him thereand this was the image under which he himself judged the matter, or at least,

not a little, thrilled and flushed with itvery much as he might have been met by some strange figure, some

unexpected occupant, at a turn of one of the dim passages of an empty house. The quaint analogy quite

hauntingly remained with him, when he didn't indeed rather improve it by a still intenser form: that of his

opening a door behind which he would have made sure of finding nothing, a door into a room shuttered and

void, and yet so coming, with a great suppressed start, on some quite erect confronting presence, something

planted in the middle of the place and facing him through the dusk. After that visit to the house in

construction he walked with his companion to see the other and always so much the better one, which in the

eastward direction formed one of the corners, the "jolly" one precisely, of the street now so generally

dishonoured and disfigured in its westward reaches, and of the comparatively conservative Avenue. The

Avenue still had pretensions, as Miss Staverton said, to decency; the old people had mostly gone, the old

names were unknown, and here and there an old association seemed to stray, all vaguely, like some very aged

person, out too late, whom you might meet and feel the impulse to watch or follow, in kindness, for safe

They went in together, our friends; he admitted himself with his key, as he kept no one there, he explained,

preferring, for his reasons, to leave the place empty, under a simple arrangement with a good woman living in

the neighbourhood and who came for a daily hour to open windows and dust and sweep. Spencer Brydon had

his reasons and was growingly aware of them; they seemed to him better each time he was there, though he

didn't name them: all to his companion, any more than he told her as yet how often, how quite absurdly often,

he himself came. He only let her see for the present, while they walked through the great blank rooms, that

absolute vacancy reigned and that, from top to bottom, there was nothing but Mrs. Muldoon's broomstick, in

a corner, to tempt the burglar. Mrs. Muldoon was then on the premises, and she loquaciously attended the

visitors, preceding them from room to room and pushing back shutters and throwing up sashesall to show

them, as she remarked, how little there was to see. There was little indeed to see in the great gaunt shell

where the main dispositions and the general apportionment of space, the style of an age of ampler allowances,

had nevertheless for its master their honest pleading message, affecting him as some good old servant's, some

lifelong retainer's appeal for a character, or even for a retiringpension; yet it was also a remark of Mrs.

Muldoon's that, glad as she was to oblige him by her noonday round, there was a request she greatly hoped he

would never make of her. If he should wish her for any reason to come in after dark she would just tell him, if

The fact that there was nothing to see didn't militate for the worthy woman against what one might see, and

she put it frankly to Miss Staverton that no lady could be expected to like, could she? "scraping up to thim top

storeys in the ayvil hours." The gas and the electric light were off the house, and she fairly evoked a

gruesome vision of her march through the great grey roomsso many of them as there were toolwith her

glimmering taper. Miss Staverton met her honest glare with a smile and the profession that she herself

certainly would recoil from such an adventure. Spencer Brydon meanwhile held his peacefor the moment;

the question of the "evil" hours in his old home had already become too grave for him. He had begun some

time since to "crape," and he knew just why a packet of candles addressed to that pursuit had been stowed by

his own hand three weeks before, at the back of a drawer of the fine old sideboard that occupied, as a

"fixture," the deep recess in the diningroom. Just now he laughed at his companionsquickly however

changing the subject; for the reason that, in the first place, his laugh struck him even at that moment as

starting the odd echo, the conscious human resonance (he scarce knew how to qualify it) that sounds made

while he was there alone sent back to his ear or his fancy; and that, in the second, he imagined Alice

Staverton for the instant on the point of asking him, with a divination, if he ever so prowled. There were

divinations he was unprepared for, and he had at all events averted enquiry by the time Mrs. Muldoon had left

There was happily enough to say, on so consecrated a spot, that could be said freely and fairly; so that a

whole train of declarations was precipitated by his friend's having herself broken out, after a yearning look

round: "But I hope you don't mean they want you to pull this to pieces!" His answer came, promptly, with his

reawakened wrath: it was of course exactly what they wanted, and what they were "at" him for, daily, with

the iteration of people who couldn't for their life understand a man's liability to decent feelings. He had found

the place, just as it stood and beyond what he could express, an interest and a joy. There were values other

than the beastly rentvalues, and in short, in short! But it was thus Miss Staverton took him up. "In short

you're to make so good a thing of your skyscraper that, living in luxury on those illgotten gains, you can

afford for a while to be sentimental here!" Her smile had for him, with the words, the particular mild irony

with which he found half her talk suffused; an irony without bitterness and that came, exactly, from her

having so much imaginationnot, like the cheap sarcasms with which one heard most people, about the

world of "society," bid for the reputation of cleverness, from nobody's really having any. It was agreeable to

him at this very moment to be sure that when he had answered, after a brief demur, "Well yes: so precisely,

you may put it!" her imagination would still do him justice. He explained that even if never a dollar were to

come to him from the other house he would nevertheless cherish this one; and he dwelt, further, while they

lingered and wandered, on the fact of the stupefaction he was already exciting, the positive mystification he

He spoke of the value of all he read into it, into the mere sight of the walls, mere shapes of the rooms, mere

sound of the floors, mere feel, in his hand, of the old silverplated knobs of the several mahogany doors,

which suggested the pressure of the palms of the dead; the seventy years of the past in fine that these things

represented, the annals of nearly three generations, counting his grandfather's, the one that had ended there,

and the impalpable ashes of his longextinct youth, afloat in the very air like microscopic motes. She listened

to everything; she was a woman who answered intimately but who utterly didn't chatter. She scattered abroad

therefore no cloud of words; she could assent, she could agree, above all she could encourage, without doing

that. Only at the last she went a little further than he had done himself. "And then how do you know? You

may still, after all, want to live here." It rather indeed pulled him up, for it wasn't what he had been thinking,

at least in her sense of the words. "You mean I may decide to stay on for the sake of it?"

"Well, with such a home!" But, quite beautifully, she had too much tact to dot so monstrous an i, and it

was precisely an illustration of the way she didn't rattle. How could any oneof any witinsist on any one

"Oh," he said, "I might have lived here (since I had my opportunity early in life); I might have put in here all

these years. Then everything would have been different enoughand, I dare say, 'funny' enough. But that's

another matter. And then the beauty of itI mean of my perversity, of my refusal to agree to a 'deal'is just

in the total absence of a reason. Don't you see that if I had a reason about the matter at all it would have to be

the other way, and would then be inevitably a reason of dollars? There are no reasons here but of dollars. Let

"They were back in the hall then for departure, but from where they stood the vista was large, through an

open door, into the great square main saloon, with its almost antique felicity of brave spaces between

windows. Her eyes came back from that reach and met his own a moment. "Are you very sure the 'ghost' of

"He had a positive sense of turning pale. But it was as near as they were then to come. For he made answer,

he believed, between a glare and a grin: "Oh ghostsof course the place must swarm with them I should be

ashamed of it if it didn't. Poor Mrs. Muldoon's right, and it's why I haven't asked her to do more than look in."

Miss Staverton's gaze again lost itself, and things she didn't utter, it was clear, came and went in her mind.

She might even for the minute, off there in the fine room, have imagined some element dimly gathering.

Simplified like the deathmask of a handsome face, it perhaps produced for her just then an effect akin to the

stir of an expression in the "set" commemorative plaster. Yet whatever her impression may have been she

produced instead a vague platitude. "Well, if it were only furnished and lived in!"

She appeared to imply that in case of its being still furnished he might have been a little less opposed to the

idea of a return. But she passed straight into the vestibule, as if to leave her words behind her, and the next

moment he had opened the housedoor and was standing with her on the steps. He closed the door and, while

he repocketed his key, looking up and down, they took in the comparatively harsh actuality of the Avenue,

which reminded him of the assault of the outer light of the Desert on the traveller emerging from an Egyptian

tomb. But he risked before they stepped into the street his gathered answer to her speech. "For me it is lived

in. For me it is furnished." At which it was easy for her to sigh "Ah yes!" all vaguely and discreetly; since

his parents and his favourite sister, to say nothing of other kin, in numbers, had run their course and met their

It was a few days after this that, during an hour passed with her again, he had expressed his impatience of the

too flattering curiosityamong the people he metabout his appreciation of New York. He had arrived at

none at all that was socially producible, and as for that matter of his "thinking" (thinking the better or the

worse of anything there) he was wholly taken up with one subject of thought. It was mere vain egoism, and it

was moreover, if she liked, a morbid obsession. He found all things come back to the question of what he

personally might have been, how he might have led his life and "turned out," if he had not so, at the outset,

given it up. And confessing for the first time to the intensity within him of this absurd speculationwhich

but proved also, no doubt, the habit of too selfishly thinkinghe affirmed the impotence there of any other

source of interest, any other native appeal. "What would it have made of me, what would it have made of me?

I keep for ever wondering, all idiotically; as if I could possibly know! I see what it has made of dozens of

others, those I meet, and it positively aches within me, to the point of exasperation, that it would have made

something of me as well. Only I can't make out what, and the worry of it, the small rage of curiosity never to

be satisfied, brings back what I remember to have felt, once or twice, after judging best, for reasons, to burn

some important letter unopened. I've been sorry, I've hated itI've never known what was in the letter. You

She was seated by her fire, and before her, on his feet and restless, he turned to and fro between this intensity

of his idea and a fitful and unseeing inspection, through his single eyeglass, of the dear little old objects on

her chimneypiece. Her interruption made him for an instant look at her harder. "I shouldn't care if you did!"

he laughed, however; "and it's only a figure, at any rate, for the way I now feel. Not to have followed my

perverse young courseand almost in the teeth of my father's curse, as I may say; not to have kept it up, so,

'over there,' from that day to this, without a doubt or a pang; not, above all, to have liked it, to have loved it,

so much, loved it, no doubt, with such an abysmal conceit of my own preference: some variation from that, I

say, must have produced some different effect for my life and for my 'form.' I should have stuck hereif it

had been possible; and I was too young, at twentythree, to judge, pour deux sous, whether it were possible.

If I had waited I might have seen it was, and then I might have been, by staying here, something nearer to one

of these types who have been hammered so hard and made so keen by their conditions. It isn't that I admire

them so muchthe question of any charm in them, or of any charm, beyond that of the rank moneypassion,

exerted by their conditions for them, has nothing to do with the matter: it's only a question of what fantastic,

yet perfectly possible, development of my own nature I mayn't have missed. It comes over me that I had then

a strange alter ego deep down somewhere within me, as the fullblown flower is in the small tight bud, and

that I just took the course, I just transferred him to the climate, that blighted him for once and for ever."

"And you wonder about the flower," Miss Staverton said. "So do I, if you want to know; and so I've been

wondering these several weeks. I believe in the flower," she continued, "I feel it would have been quite

"Monstrous above all!" her visitor echoed; "and I imagine, by the same stroke, quite hideous and offensive."

"You don't believe that," she returned; "if you did you wouldn't wonder. You'd know, and that would be

enough for you. What you feeland what I feel for youis that you'd have had power."

He stood before her stillher question kept him motionless. He took it in, so much there was of it; and

indeed his not otherwise meeting it testified to that. "I know at least what I am," he simply went on; "the

other side of the medal's clear enough. I've not been edifyingI believe I'm thought in a hundred quarters to

have been barely decent. I've followed strange paths and worshipped strange gods; it must have come to you

again and againin fact you've admitted to me as muchthat I was leading, at any time these thirty years, a

"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born to be what you are, anywhere, anyway:

you've the perfection nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without my exile, I shouldn't

"The great thing to see," she presently said, "seems to me to be that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled

your being here at last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking" She also however faltered.

He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. "Do you believe thentoo dreadfully!that

"Oh no! Far from it!" With which she got up from her chair and was nearer to him. "But I don't care," she

She considered a little. "Will you believe it if I say so? I mean will you let that settle your question for you?"

And then as if making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had some idea which, however

absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: "Oh you don't care eitherbut very differently: you don't care for

Spencer Brydon recognised itit was in fact what he had absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified.

"He isn't myself. He's the just so totally other person. But I do want to see him," he added. "And I can. And I

Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers that she divined his strange sense. But

neither of them otherwise expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting shock, no easy

derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet, constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an

element that was like breathable air. What she said however was unexpected. "Well, I've seen him."

This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him. "You dream about me at that rate?"

His eyes again sounded her. "Then you know all about him." And as she said nothing more: "What's the

She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that, resisting for reasons of her own, she had to

It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous

secret thrill, in the particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to what he more and more

believed to be his privilege. It was what in these weeks he was living for since he really felt life to begin

but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the ample house from attic to cellar, making

sure he was alone, he knew himself in safe of in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let himself go.

He sometimes came twice in the twentyfour hours; the moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk,

of the short autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he found himself hoping most.

Then he could, as seemed to him, most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine attention,

never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only

wished he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Laterrarely much before midnight,

but then for a considerable vigilhe watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high,

playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of communication between

rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he

pretended to invite. It was practice he found he could perfectly "work" without exciting remark; no one was

in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully

He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm proprietorship; and accident so far favoured

him that, if a fat Avenue "officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleventhirty, he had

never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at two. He walked there on the crisp November

nights, arrived regularly at the evening's end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take his way to a

club or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel;

and when he left his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to his club.

Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his

experience something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of consciousness.

He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly, old relationsmet indeed, so far as he could, new

expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such different contacts,

which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to

edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim secondary social successand all with

people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this

popping of their corksjust as his gestures of response were the extravagant shadows, emphatic in

proportion as they meant little, of some game of ombres chinoises. He projected himself all day, in thought,

straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the other, the real, the waiting life; the life

that, as soon as he had heard behind him the click of his great housedoor, began for him, on the jolly corner,

as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the old marble of the hall pavement, large

blackandwhite squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in

him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating

tinkle as of some faroff bell hung who should say where?in the depths of the house, of the past, of that

mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe, abandoned it. On this

impression he did ever the same thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a cornerfeeling the place once

more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave crystal, set delicately humming by the

play of a moist finger round its edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world, and the

indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of

all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to

wake them into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably

shy, but they weren't really sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto felt thembefore they had taken

the Form he so yearned to make them take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting

on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from storey to storey.

That was the essence of his visionwhich was all rank folly, if one would, while he was out of the house

and otherwise occupied, but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He

knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for

cash. His alter ego "walked" that was the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his

own odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he

himself didMrs. Muldoon had been right, absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence

he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious and as shifty; the conviction of its

probable, in fact its already quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to night,

laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had been comparable. It had been the theory of

many superficiallyjudging persons, he knew, that he was wasting that life in a surrender to sensations, but

he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at

once the patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at bay perhaps more formidable,

than any beast of the forest. The terms, the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again

into play; there were even moments when passages of his occasional experience as a sportsman, stirred

memories, from his younger time, of moor and mountain and desert, revived for himand to the increase of

his keennessby the tremendous force of analogy. He found himself at momentsonce he had placed his

single light on some mantelshelf or in some recessstepping back into shelter or shade, effacing himself

behind a door or in an embrasure, as he had sought of old the vantage of rock and tree; he found himself

holding his breath and living in the joy of the instant, the supreme suspense created by big game alone.

He wasn't afraid (though putting himself the question as he believed gentlemen on Bengal tigershoots or in

close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this

indeedsince here at least he might be frank!because of the impression, so intimate and so strange, that

he himself produced as yet a dread, produced certainly a strain, beyond the liveliest he was likely to feel.

They fell for him into categories, they fairly became familiar, the signs, for his own perception, of the alarm

his presence and his vigilance created; though leaving him always to remark, portentously, on his probably

having formed a relation, his probably enjoying a consciousness, unique in the experience of man. People

enough, first and last, had been in terror of apparitions, but who had ever before so turned the tables and

become himself, in the apparitional world, an incalculable terror? He might have found this sublime had he

quite dared to think of it; but he didn't too much insist, truly, on that side of his privilege. With habit and

repetition he gained to an extraordinary degree the power to penetrate the dusk of distances and the darkness

of corners, to resolve back into their innocence the treacheries of uncertain light, the evillooking forms

taken in the gloom by mere shadows, by accidents of the air, by shifting effects of perspective; putting down

his dim luminary he could still wander on without it, pass into other rooms and, only knowing it was there

behind him in case of need, see his way about, visually project for his purpose a comparative clearness. It

made him feel, this acquired faculty, like some monstrous stealthy cat; he wondered if he would have glared

at these moments with large shining yellow eyes, and what it mightn't verily be, for the poor hardpressed

He liked however the open shutters; he opened everywhere those Mrs. Muldoon had closed, closing them as

carefully afterwards, so that she shouldn't notice: he likedoh this he did like, and above all in the upper

rooms!the sense of the hard silver of the autumn stars through the windowpanes, and scarcely less the

flare of the streetlamps below, the white electric lustre which it would have taken curtains to keep out. This

was human actual social; this was of the world he had lived in, and he was more at his ease certainly for the

countenance, coldly general and impersonal, that all the while and in spite of his detachment it seemed to

give him. He had support of course mostly in the rooms at the wide front and the prolonged side; it failed him

considerably in the central shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his rounds, was glad of

his optical reach, so none the less often the rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The

place was there more subdivided; a large "extension" in particular, where small rooms for servants had been

multiplied abounded in nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications especially of an ample

back staircase over which he leaned, many a time, to look far downnot deterred from his gravity even

while aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn simpleton playing at hideandseek.

Outside in fact he might himself make that ironic rapprochement; but within the walls, and in spite of the

It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness of his victim to become a real test for him; since

he had quite put it to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate" his whole perception. He

had felt it as above all open to cultivationwhich indeed was but another name for his manner of spending

his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown

so fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his general postulate, that couldn't have broken

upon him at once. This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite frequent for him in the

upper rooms, the recognitionabsolutely unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his

resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nightsof his being

definitely followed, tracked at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should the less

confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to pursue. It worried, it finally quite broke him up, for it

proved, of all the conceivable impressions, the one least suited to his book. He was kept in sight while

remaining himselfas regards the essence of his positionsightless, and his only recourse then was in

abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about, retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his

face at least the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true that his fully dislocalised

thought of these manoeuvres recalled to him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from

behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of the conditions themselves each time he was

reexposed to them, so that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become constant, would on a certain

side have but ministered to his intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the premises the

baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and the result of the third was to confirm the aftereffect of

On his return, that nightthe night succeeding his last intermissionhe stood in the hall and looked up the

staircase with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known. "He's there, at the top, and waitingnot,

as in general, falling back for disappearance. He's holding his ground, and it's the first timewhich is a

proof, isn't it? that something has happened for him." So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his

foot on the lowest stair; in which position he felt as never before the air chilled by his logic. He himself

turned cold in it, for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. "Harder pressed?yes, he

takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I've come, as they say, 'to stay.' He finally doesn't like and

can't bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now balances with his dread. I've

hunted him till he has 'turned': that, up there, is what has happenedhe's the fanged or the antlered animal

brought at last to bay." There came to him, as I saybut determined by an influence beyond my

notation!the acuteness of this certainty; under which however the next moment he had broken into a sweat

that he would as little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it

for enterprise. it marked none the less a prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt,

but also represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most joyous, possibly the next minute

"He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to anger, he'll fight!"this intense impression

made a single mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the applause, for

the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was

thus in the last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled theresomewhere near at hand, however unseen

stillas the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this

instant tasted probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent with sanity.

It was as if it would have shamed him that a character so associated with his own should triumphantly

succeed in just skulking, should to the end not risk the open, so that the drop of this danger was, on the spot, a

great lift of the whole situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to

measure by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another

form, actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it.

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and the strangest moment of his

adventure perhaps, the most memorable or really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of

certain instants of concentrated conscious combat, the sense of a need to hold on to something. even after the

manner of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to act, to

charge, somehow and upon somethingto show himself, in a word, that he wasn't afraid. The state of

"holdingon" was thus the state to which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the

great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having clutched it as he might under a shock

at home have clutched the nearest chairback. He had been surprised at any rateof this he was

awareinto something unprecedented since his original appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes,

held them tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened

them the room, the other contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed lighterso light, almost, that at first he

took the change for day. He stood firm, however that might be, just where he had paused; his resistance had

helped himit was as if there were something he had tided over. He knew after a little what this wasit had

been in the imminent danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without this he would have

made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with his eyes closed, he would have descended them,

Well, as he had held out, here he wasstill at the top, among the more intricate upper rooms and with the

gauntlet of the others, of all the rest of the house, still to run when it should be his time to go. He would go at

his timeonly at his time: didn't he go every night very much at the same hour? He took out his

watchthere was light for that: it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon. He

reached his lodgings for the most part at twowith his walk of a quarter of an hour. He would wait for the

last quarterhe wouldn't stir till then; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting while he

held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which he recognised, would serve perfectly for the

attestation he desired to make. It would prove his courageunless indeed the latter might most be proved by

his budging at last from his place. What he mainly felt now was that, since he hadn't originally scuttled, he

had his dignitieswhich had never in his life seemed so manyall to preserve and to carry aloft. This was

before him in truth as a physical image, an image almost worthy of an age of greater romance. That remark

indeed glimmered for him only to glow the next instant with a finer light; since what age of romance, after

all, could have matched either the state of his mind or, "objectively," as they said, the wonder of his situation?

The only difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his head as in a parchment scroll, he

might thenthat is in the heroic timehave proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.

At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next room would have to figure his sword;

which utensil, in the course of a minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of. The

door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door opened to a third. These rooms, as he

remembered, gave all three upon a common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without

issue save through the preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step again, was appreciably a help;

though even in recognising this he lingered once more a little by the chimneypiece on which his light had

rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found himself considering a circumstance that,

after his first and comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that often attends some

pang of recollection, the violent shock of having ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the door

in which the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the nearer threshold, the

one not directly facing it. Placed at some distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the

last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it not, to his intimate conviction, been

closed since his former visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He stared with all his

eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded

its sense. Surely it had been subsequently closedthat is it had been on his previous passage indubitably

He took it full in the face that something had happened betweenthat he couldn't not have noticed before

(by which he meant on his original tour of all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally

presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation so extraordinary that it might have

muddled for him any earlier view; and he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into

the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the door after him. The difficulty was

that this exactly was what he never did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence of

which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was well aware quite on the brain: the

strange apparition, at the far end of one of them, of his baffled "prey" (which had become by so sharp an

irony so little the term now to apply!) was the form of success his imagination had most cherished, projecting

into it always a refinement of beauty. He had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards

dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself "There!" under some fond brief hallucination. The house, as the

case stood, admirably lent itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the particular time,

which could rejoice so in the multiplication of doorsthe opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost

complete proscription of them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this obsession of the presence

encountered telescopically, as he might say, focussed and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest

It was with these considerations that his present attention was chargedthey perfectly availed to make what

he saw portentous. He couldn't, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn't, if it was

unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been another agent? Another agent?he had been

catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when had he been so close as in this simple,

this logical, this completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that one might have taken it for personal;

yet for what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their

sockets. Ah this time at last they were, the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as

much as one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not before, the question of couragefor

what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was "Show us how much you have!" It stared, it glared

back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not? Oh to

have this consciousness was to thinkand to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the lapsing

moments, not to have acted! Not to have actedthat was the misery and the pangwas even still not to act;

was in fact all to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did

he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changedas just by the

effect of its intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveably

done, thus giving notice like some stark signboardunder that accession of accent the situation itself had

turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.

It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme hint, for him, of the value of Discretion! This

slowly dawned, no doubtfor it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold, had he been stayed, so

little as yet had he either advanced or retreated. It was the strangestof all things that now when, by his taking

ten steps and applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if necessary, to a panel, all the

hunger of his prime need might have been met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuagedit was

amazing, but it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should have, at a touch, quite dropped from him.

Discretionhe jumped at that; and yet not, verily, at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but

because, much more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he "jumped" at it I feel the consonance of

this term with the fact thatat the end indeed of I know not how longhe did move again, he crossed

straight to the door. He wouldn't touch itit seemed now that he might if he would: he would only just wait

there a little, to show, to prove, that he wouldn't. He had thus another station, close to the thin partition by

which revelation was denied him; but with his eyes bent and his hands held off in a mere intensity of

stillness. He listened as if there had been something to hear, but this attitude, while it lasted, was his own

communication. "If you won't thengood: I spare you and I give up. You affect me as by the appeal

positively for pity: you convince me that for reasons rigid and sublime what do I know?we both of us

should have suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as I believe, it has never been

given to man, I retire, I renouncenever, on my honour, to try again. So rest for everand let me!"

That, for Brydon was the deep sense of this last demonstrationsolemn, measured, directed, as he felt it to

be He brought it to a close, he turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He

retraced his steps taking up his candle, burnt, he observed, wellnigh to the socket, and marking again,

lighten it as he would, the distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself at the other

side of the house. He did here what he had not yet done at these hourshe opened half a casement, one of

those in the front, and let in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time previous for a sharp

rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now and it didn't matterbroken by his concession and his

surrender, which made it idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty streetits other life so

marked even by the great lamplit vacancywas within call, within touch he stayed there as to be in it again,

high above it though he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some vulgar

human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some nightbird however base. He would have blessed that

sign of life; he would have welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom he had

hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol had come into sight he mightn't have felt the

impulse to get into relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.

The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising, the explanation that would have saved his

dignity and kept his name, in such a case, out of the papers was not definite to him: he was so occupied with

the thought of recording his Discretionas an effect of the vow he had just uttered to his intimate

adversarythat the importance of this loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of

proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the house, even one of the vertiginous

perpendiculars employed by painters and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have

managed somehow, astride of the windowsill, to compass by outstretched leg and arm that mode of descent.

If there had been some such uncanny thing as he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fireescape in

the form of notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a proofwell, of his

present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment, as the question stood, a little in vain, and evenat the end of he

scarce knew, once more, how longfound it, as by the action on his mind of the failure of response of the

outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great

grim hush; the life of the town was itself under a spellso unnaturally, up and down the whole prospect of

known and rather ugly objects, the blankness and the silence lasted. Had they ever, he asked himself, the

hardfaced houses, which had begun to look livid in the dim dawn, had they ever spoken so little to any need

of his spirit? Great builded voids, great crowded stillnesses put on, often, in the heart of cities, for the small

hours, a sort of sinister mask, and it was of this large collective negation that Brydon presently became

consciousall the more that the break of day was, almost incredibly, now at hand, proving to him what night

He looked again at his watch, saw what had become of his timevalues (he had taken hours for

minutesnot, as in other tense situations, minutes for hours) and the strange air of the streets was but the

weak, the sullen flush of a dawn in which everything was still locked up. His choked appeal from his own

open window had been the sole note of life, and he could but break off at last as for a worse despair. Yet

while so deeply demoralised he was capable again of an impulse denotingat least by his present

measureextraordinary resolution; of retracing his steps to the spot where he had turned cold with the

extinction of his last pulse of doubt as to there being in the place another presence than his own. This required

an effort strong enough to sicken him; but he had his reason, which overmastered for the moment

everything else. There was the whole of the rest of the house to traverse, and how should he screw himself to

that if the door he had seen closed were at present open? He could hold to the idea that the closing had

practically been for him an act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground and

never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked; but what it meant for him depended now

clearly on the amount of forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had engendered. The

image of the "presence," whatever it was, waiting there for him to gothis image had not yet been so

concrete for his nerves as when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to him. For,

with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread, he did stop shorthe hung back from really seeing.

The risk was too great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific form.

He knewyes, as he had never known anythingthat, should he see the door open, it would all too abjectly

be the end of him. It would mean that the agent of his shame for his shame was the deep abjectionwas

once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in the face was the act that this would

determine for him. It would send him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be

long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself uncontrollably insanely fatally take his

way to the street. The hideous chance of this he at least could avert; but he could only avert it by recoiling in

time from assurance. He had the whole house to deal with, this fact was still there; only he now knew that

uncertainty alone could start him. He stole back from where he had checked himselfmerely to do so was

suddenly like safetyand, making blindly for the greater staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages

behind. Here was the top of the stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious landings to mark off.

His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple

of minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. He couldn't have spoken, the tone of his voice

would have scared him, and the common conceit or resource of "whistling in the dark" (whether literally or

figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to hear himself go, and when he had

reached his first landing taking it all with no rush, but quite steadilythat stage of success drew from him

a gasp of relief. The house, withal, seemed immense, the scale of space again inordinate; the open rooms to

no one of which his eyes deflected, gloomed in their shuttered state like mouths of caverns; only the high

skylight that formed the crown of the deep well created for him a medium in which he could advance, but

which might have been, for queerness of colour, some watery underworld. He tried to think of something

noble, as that his property was really grand, a splendid possession; but this nobleness took the form too of the

clear delight with which he was finally to sacrifice it. They might come in now, the builders, the destroyers

they might come as soon as they would. At the end of two flights he had dropped to another zone, and from

the middle of the third, with only one more left, he recognised the influence of the lower windows, of

halfdrawn blinds, of the occasional gleam of streetlamps, of the glazed spaces of the vestibule. This was

the bottom of the sea, which showed an illumination of its own and which he even saw pavedwhen at a

given moment he drew up to sink a long look over the banisterswith the marble squares of his childhood.

By that time indubitably he felt, as he might have said in a commoner cause, better; it had allowed him to

stop and draw breath, and the ease increased with the sight of the old blackandwhite slabs. But what he

most felt was that now surely, with the element of impunity pulling him as by hard firm hands, the case was

settled for what he might have seen above had he dared that last look. The closed door, blessedly remote now,

He came down further, he crossed the passage forming the access to the last flight; and if here again he

stopped an instant it was almost for the sharpness of the thrill of assured escape. It made him shut his

eyeswhich opened again to the straight slope of the remainder of the stairs. Here was impunity still, but

impunity almost excessive; inasmuch as the sidelights and the high fantracery of the entrance were

glimmering straight into the hall; an appearance produced, he the next instant saw, by the fact that the

vestibule gaped wide, that the hinged halves of the inner door had been thrown far back. Out of that again the

question sprang at him, making his eyes, as he felt, half start from his head, as they had done, at the top of the

house, before the sign of the other door. If he had left that one open, hadn't he left this one closed, and wasn't

he now in most immediate presence of some inconceivable occult activity? It was as sharp, the question, as a

knife in his side, but the answer hung fire still and seemed to lose itself in the vague darkness to which the

thin admitted dawn, glimmering archwise over the whole outer door made a semicircular margin, a cold

silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he lookedto shift and expand and contract.

It was as if there had been something within it, protected by indistinctness and corresponding in extent with

the opaque surface behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of which the key was in his

pocket. The indistinctness mocked him even while he stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or

challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his step he let himself go with the sense that here

was at last something to meet, to touch, to take, to knowsomething all unnatural and dreadful, but to

advance upon which was the condition for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The penumbra, dense

and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some

blackvizored sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was to recall and make out, the

particular thing he had believed during the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering margin,

the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking the very form toward which, for so many days, the

passion of his curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it was somebody, the prodigy

Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance and stature waited there to measure

himself with his power to dismay. This only could it bethis only till he recognised, with his advance, that

what made the face dim was the pair of raised hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in

defiance, it was buried as for dark deprecation. So Brydon, before him, took him in; with every fact of him

now, in the higher light, hard and acutehis planted stillness, his vivid truth, his grizzled bent head and

white masking hands, his queer actuality of eveningdress, of dangling double eyeglass, of gleaming silk

lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watchguard and polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern

master could have presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if there

had been "treatment," of the consummate sort, in his every shade and salience. The revulsion, for our friend,

had become, before he knew it, immensethis drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his

adversary's inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him; for he could but

gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape as a proof that he, standing there for the achieved, the

enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the proof in the splendid covering

hands, strong and completely spread?so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity that

surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as

"Saved," though, would it be?Brydon breathed his wonder till the very impunity of his attitude and the

very insistence of his eyes produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper

portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move,

to open; then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror,

with the sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter; for the bared

identity was too hideous as his, and his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, that face, Spencer

Brydon's?he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and denial, falling straight from his

height and sublimity. It was unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility! He had

been "sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence before him was a presence, the

horror within him a horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his

adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at no point, made its alternative monstrous. A thousand times

yes, as it came upon him nearer nowthe face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now,

quite as one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for the stranger,

whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give

ground. Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and falling back as under the hot breath

and the roused passion of a life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his own collapsed, he

felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had

What had next brought him back, clearlythough after how long?was Mrs. Muldoon's voice, coming to

him from quite near, from so near that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground before him

while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on the ground, but halfraised and upheldconscious,

yes, of tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in extraordinary softness and faintly

refreshing fragrance. He considered, he wondered, his wit but half at his service then another face

intervened, bending more directly over him, and he finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an

ample and perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself on the lowest degree of the

staircase, the rest of his long person remaining stretched on his old blackandwhite slabs. They were cold,

these marble squares of his youth; but he somehow was not, in this rich return of consciousnessthe most

wonderful hour, little by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so gratefully, so abysmally

passive, and yet as with a treasure of intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation; dissolved, he

might call it, in the air of the place and producing the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had come

back, yescome back from further away than any man but himself had ever travelled; but it was strange

how with this sense what he had come back to seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious journey

had been all for the sake of it. Slowly but surely his consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus

completing itself: he had been miraculously carried backlifted and carefully borne as from where he had

been picked up, the uttermost end of an interminable grey passage. Even with this he was suffered to rest, and

It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledgeyes, this was the beauty of his state; which came to

resemble more and more that of a man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and then,

after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of

certitude and has only to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his patiencethat he had only to let it

shine on him. He must moreover, with intermissions, still have been lifted and borne since why and how

else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his

stairssituated as these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnelbut on a deep windowbench of

his high saloon, over which had been spread, couchfashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that

was familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling as for its pledge of truth. Mrs.

Muldoon's face had gone, but the other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that showed

how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in, and the more he took it the more it seemed to

suffice: he was as much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two women who had found him,

on Mrs. Muldoon's having plied, at her usual hour, her latchkey and on her having above all arrived while

Miss Staverton still lingered near the house. She had been turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain

bellhandleher calculation having been of the hour of the good woman's visit; but the latter, blessedly, had

come up while she was still there, and they had entered together. He had then lain, beyond the vestibule, very

much as he was lying now quite, that is, as he appeared to have fallen, but all so wondrously without

bruise or gash; only in a depth of stupor. What he most took in, however, at present, with the steadier

clearance, was that Alice Staverton had for a long unspeakable moment not doubted he was dead.

"It must have been that I was." He made it out as she held him. "YesI can only have died. You brought me

literally to life. Only," he wondered, his eyes rising to her, "only, in the name of all the benedictions, how?"

It took her but an instant to bend her face and kiss him, and something in the manner of it, and in the way her

hands clasped and locked his head while he felt the cool charity and virtue of her lips, something in all this

"Oh keep me, keep me" he pleaded while her face still hung over him: in response to which it dropped again

and stayed close, clingingly close. It was the seal of their situationof which he tasted the impress for a long

"Yes, I rememberI was to have gone to you at one today." It caught on to their "old" life and

relationwhich were so near and so far. "I was still out there in my strange darknesswhere was it, what

was it? I must have stayed there so long." He could but wonder at the death and the duration of his swoon.

"Since last night?" she asked with a shade of fear for her possible indiscretion.

"Since this morningit must have been: the cold dim dawn of today. Where have I been," he vaguely

wailed, "where have I been?" He felt her hold him close, and it was as if this helped him now to make in all

All in her tenderness she had waited a moment. "In the cold dim dawn?" she quavered.

But he had already gone on piecing together the parts of the whole prodigy. "As I didn't turn up you came

"She barely cast about. "I went first to your hotel where they told me of your absence. You had dined out

last evening and hadn't been back since. But they appeared to know you had been at your club."

"I believed at least you'd have been here. I've known, all along," she said, "that you've been coming."

"Well, I've believed it. I said nothing to you after that talk we had a month agobut I felt sure. I knew you

"Ah but I didn't" cried Brydon with his long wail. "There's somebodyan awful beast; whom I brought, too

At this she bent over him again, and her eyes were in his eyes. "Noit's not you." And it was as if, while her

face hovered, he might have made out in it, hadn't it been so near, some particular meaning blurred by a

smile. "No, thank heaven," she repeated"it's not you! Of course it wasn't to have been."

"Ah but it was," he gently insisted. And he stared before him now as he had been staring for so many weeks.

"You couldn't!" she returned consolingly. And then reverting, and as if to account further for what she had

herself done, "But it wasn't only that, that you hadn't been at home," she went on. "I waited till the hour at

which we had found Mrs. Muldoon that day of my going with you; and she arrived, as I've told you, while,

failing to bring any one to the door, I lingered in my despair on the steps. After a little, if she hadn't come, by

such a mercy, I should have found means to hunt her up. But it wasn't," said Alice Staverton, as if once more

She met it, the wonder she had stirred. "In the cold dim dawn, you say? Well, in the cold dim dawn of this

He lay an instant taking it inas if he wished to be quite reasonable. "At the same moment?"

"Yesin my dream again, the same one I've named to you. He came back to me. Then I knew it for a sign.

At this Brydon raised himself; he had to see her better. She helped him when she understood his movement,

and he sat up, steadying himself beside her there on the windowbench and with his right hand grasping her

"Ah I've come to myself nowthanks to you, dearest. But this brute, with his awful facethis brute's a

black stranger. He's none of me, even as I might have been," Brydon sturdily declared.

But she kept the clearness that was like the breath of infallibility. "Isn't the whole point that you'd have been

Her look again was more beautiful to him than the things of this world. "Haven't you exactly wanted to know

"Because, as I told you weeks ago, my mind, my imagination, had worked so over what you might, what you

mightn't have beento show you, you see, how I've thought of you. In the midst of that you came to

methat my wonder might be answered. So I knew," she went on; "and believed that, since the question

held you too so fast, as you told me that day, you too would see for yourself. And when this morning I again

saw I knew it would be because you hadand also then, from the first moment, because you somehow

wanted me. He seemed to tell me of that. So why," she strangely smiled, "shouldn't I like him?"

"I could have liked him. And to me," she said, "he was no horror. I had accepted him."

"Before, for the interest of his differenceyes. And as I didn't disown him, as I knew himwhich you at

last, confronted with him in his difference, so cruelly didn't, my dearwell, he must have been, you see, less

"She was beside him on her feet, but still holding his handstill with her arm supporting him. But though it

all brought for him thus a dim light, "You 'pitied' him?" he grudgingly, resentfully asked.

"Ah I don't say I like him better," she granted after a thought. "But he's grim, he's wornand things have

"No"it struck Brydon: "I couldn't have sported mine 'downtown.' They'd have guyed me there."

"His great convex pincenezI saw it, I recognised the kindis for his poor ruined sight. And his poor

"Ah!" Brydon wincedwhether for his proved identity or for his lost fingers. Then, "He has a million a