seemed lighter—­so 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 him—­it was as if there were something he had tided over.  He knew after a little what this was—­it 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, would have known how, straight and swiftly, to the bottom.

Well, as he had held out, here he was—­still 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 time—­only at his time:  didn’t he go every night very much at the same hour?  He took out his watch—­there was light for that:  it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon.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 two—­with his walk of a quarter of an hour.  He would wait for the last quarter—­he 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 courage—­unless 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 dignities—­which had never in his life seemed so many—­all 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 then—­that is in the heroic time—­have 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 chimney-piece 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