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 them—­before 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 vision—­which 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 did—­Mrs. 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 superficially-judging 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 him—­and to the increase of his keenness—­by the tremendous force of analogy.  He found himself at moments—­once he had placed his single light on some mantel-shelf or in some recess—­stepping 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 tiger-shoots or in close quarters with the great bear of the Rockies had been known to confess to having put it); and this indeed—­since 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