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 cultivation—­which 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 recognition—­absolutely unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated absence of three nights—­of 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 himself—­as regards the essence of his position—­sightless, 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 re-exposed 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 after-effect of the second.

On his return that night—­the night succeeding his last intermission—­he 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 waiting—­not, as in general, falling back for disappearance.  He’s holding his ground, and it’s the first time—­which 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