With his next glass of brandy he was all for going back to his flat.  Not go back?  Indeed, he would go back!  They should very soon see whether he was to be turned out of his place like that!  He began to wonder why he was doing the rather unusual thing he was doing at that moment, unusual for him—­sitting hatless, drinking brandy, in a public-house.  Suppose he were to tell the white-haired landlady all about it—­to tell her that a caller had scratched her hand on a nail, had later had the bad luck to put her foot through a rotten stair, and that he himself, in an old house full of squeaks and creaks and whispers, had heard a minute noise and had bolted from it in fright—­what would she think of him?  That he was mad, of course....  Pshaw!  The real truth of the matter was that he hadn’t been doing enough work to occupy him.  He had been dreaming his days away, filling his head with a lot of moonshine about a new Romilly (as if the old one was not good enough), and now he was surprised that the devil should enter an empty head!

Yes, he would go back.  He would take a walk in the air first—­he hadn’t walked enough lately—­and then he would take himself in hand, settle the hash of that sixteenth chapter of Romilly (fancy, he had actually been fool enough to think of destroying fifteen chapters!) and thenceforward he would remember that he had obligations to his fellow-men and work to do in the world.  There was the matter in a nutshell.

He finished his brandy and went out.

He had walked for some time before any other bearing of the matter than that on himself occurred to him.  At first, the fresh air had increased the heady effect of the brandy he had drunk; but afterwards his mind grew clearer than it had been since morning.  And the clearer it grew, the less final did his boastful self-assurances become, and the firmer his conviction that, when all explanations had been made, there remained something that could not be explained.  His hysteria of an hour before had passed; he grew steadily calmer; but the disquieting conviction remained.  A deep fear took possession of him.  It was a fear for Elsie.

For something in his place was inimical to her safety.  Of themselves, her two accidents might not have persuaded him of this; but she herself had said it. “I’m not wanted here...”  And she had declared that there was something wrong with the place.  She had seen it before he had.  Well and good.  One thing stood out clearly:  namely, that if this was so, she must be kept away for quite another reason than that which had so confounded and humiliated Oleron.  Luckily she had expressed her intention of staying away; she must be held to that intention.  He must see to it.

And he must see to it all the more that he now saw his first impulse, never to set foot in the place again, was absurd.  People did not do that kind of thing.  With Elsie made secure, he could not with any respect to himself suffer himself to be turned out by a shadow, nor even by a danger merely because it was a danger.  He had to live somewhere, and he would live there.  He must return.