He looked at the front door, tried the chain, and made sure that both top and bottom bolts were thrown.  Why he should have taken these somewhat unusual precautions was not far to seek, though at the moment he could not probably have explained.  The desire for protection was awake in his being, and he took these measures of security and defense because it sought to express itself, as it were, even automatically.  Spinrobin was afraid.

Up the broad staircase he went softly with his lighted candle, leaving the great hall behind him full to the brim with shadows—­shadows that moved and took shape.  His own head and shoulders in monstrous outline poured over the walls and upper landings, and thence leaped to the skylight overhead.  As he passed the turn in the stairs, the dark contents of the hall below rushed past in a single mass, like an immense extended wing, and settled abruptly at his back, following him thence to the landing.

Once there, he went more quickly, moving on tiptoe, and so reached his own room halfway down.  He passed two doors to get there; another two lay beyond; all four, as he believed, being always locked.  It was these four rooms that conjured mightily with his imagination always, for these were the rooms he pictured to himself, though without a vestige of proof, as being occupied.  It was from the further ones—­one or other of them—­he believed Mr. Skale came when he had passed down the corridor at two in the morning, stealthily, hurriedly, on the heels of that rush of sound that made him shake in his bed as he heard it.

In his own room, however, surrounded by the familiar and personal objects that reminded him of normal life, he felt more at home.  He undressed quickly, all his candles alight, and then sat before the fire in the armchair to read a little before getting into bed.

And he read for choice Hebrew—­Hebrew poetry, and on this particular occasion, the books of Job and Ezekiel.  For nothing had so soothing and calming an effect upon him as the mighty yet simple imagery of these sonorous stanzas; they invariably took him “out of himself,” or at any rate out of the region of small personal alarms.  And thus, letting his fancy roam, it seems, he was delighted to find that gradually the fears which had dominated him during the day and evening disappeared.  He passed with the poetry into that region of high adventure which his nature in real life denied him.  The verses uplifted him in a way that made his recent timidity seem the mere mood of a moment, or at least negligible.  His memory, as one thing suggested another, began to give up its dead, and some of Blake’s drawings, seen recently in London with prodigious effect, began to pass vividly before his mental vision.