As the picture drew out more clearly in the mind of Anthony, he turned from the lighted room, threw open a window, and leaned out to breathe the calm, damp air of night.

It was infinitely cool, infinitely fresh.  To his left a row of young trees darted their slender tops at the sky like shadowy spearheads.  The smell of wet leaves and the wet grass beneath rose up to him.  To the right, for his own room stood in a wing of the mansion, the house shouldered its way into the gloom, a solemn, grey shadow, netted in a black tracery of climbing vine.  In all the stretch of wall only two windows were lighted, and those yellow squares, he knew, belonged to his father.  He had left the secret room, therefore.

As he watched, a shadow brushed slowly across one of the drawn shades, swept the second, and returned at once in the opposite direction.  Back and forth, back and forth, that shadow moved, and as his eye grew accustomed to watching, he caught quite clearly the curve of the shoulders and the forward droop of the head.

It was not until then that the first alarm came to Anthony, for he knew that the footsteps of the big grey man were dogged by fear.  He could no more conceive it than he could imagine noon and midnight in conjunction, and feeling as guilty as if he had played the part of an eavesdropper he turned away, snapped off the lights, and slipped into bed.

The pleasant warmth of sleep would not come.  In its place the images of the day filed past him like the dance of figures on a motion picture screen, and always, like the repeated entrance of the hero, the other images grew small and dim.  He saw again the burly stranger wading through the crowd in the arena, shaking off the packed mob as the prow of a stately ship shakes off the water, to either side.

At length he started out of bed and glanced through the window.  The moving shadow still swept across the lighted shades of his father’s room; so he donned bathrobe and slippers and went down the long hall.  At the door he did not stop to knock, for he was too deeply concerned by this time to pay any heed to convention.  He grasped the knob and threw the door wide open.  What happened then was so sudden that he could not be sure afterward what he had seen.  He was certain that the door opened on a lighted room, yet before he could step in the lights were snapped out.

He was staring into a deep void of night; and a silence came about him like a whisper.  Out of that silence he thought after a second that he caught the sound of a hurried breathing, louder and louder, as though someone were creeping upon him.  He glanced over his shoulder in a slight panic, but down the grey hall on either side there was nothing to be seen.  Once more he looked back into the solemn room, opened his lips to speak, changed his mind, and closed the door again.

Yet when he looked down again from his own room the lights shone once more on the shades of his father’s windows.  Past them brushed the shadow of the pacing man, up and down, up and down.  He turned his eyes away to the jagged tops of the young trees, to the glimpses of dark fields beyond them, and inhaled the scent of the wet, green things.  It seemed to Anthony as if it all were hostile—­as though the whole outdoors were besieging this house.