With a strong shudder, he strode forward, and turned up the flames of the chandelier.  A flood of garish light filled the apartment.  In a moment, remembering the letter to which the phantom of his dream had pointed, he turned and took it from the table.  The last page lay upward, and every word of the solemn counsel at the end seemed to dilate on the paper, and all its mighty meaning rushed upon his soul.  Trembling in his own despite, he laid it down and moved away.  A physician, he remembered that he was in a state of violent nervous excitement, and thought that when he grew calmer its effects would pass from him.  But the hand that had touched him had gone down deeper than the physician, and reached what God had made.

He strove in vain.  The very room, in its light and silence, and the lurking sentiment of something watching him, became terrible.  He could not endure it.  The devils in his heart, grown pusillanimous, cowered beneath the flashing strokes of his aroused and terrible conscience.  He could not endure it.  He must go out.  He will walk the streets.  It is not late,—­it is but ten o’clock.  He will go.

The air of his dream still hung heavily about him.  He was in the street,—­he hardly remembered how he had got there, or when; but there he was, wrapped up from the searching cold, thinking, with a quiet horror in his mind, of the darkened room he had left behind, and haunted by the sense that something was groping about there in the darkness, searching for him.  The night was still and cold.  The full moon was in the zenith.  Its icy splendor lay on the bare streets, and on the walls of the dwellings.  The lighted oblong squares of curtained windows, here and there, seemed dim and waxen in the frigid glory.  The familiar aspect of the quarter had passed away, leaving behind only a corpse-like neighborhood, whose huge, dead features, staring rigidly through the thin, white shroud of moonlight that covered all, left no breath upon the stainless skies.  Through the vast silence of the night he passed along; the very sound of his footfalls was remote to his muffled sense.

Gradually, as he reached the first corner, he had an uneasy feeling that a thing—­a formless, unimaginable thing—­was dogging him.  He had thought of going down to his club-room; but he now shrank from entering, with this thing near him, the lighted rooms where his set were busy with cards and billiards, over their liquors and cigars, and where the heated air was full of their idle faces and careless chatter, lest some one should bawl out that he was pale, and ask him what was the matter, and he should answer, tremblingly, that something was following him, and was near him then!  He must get rid of it first; he must walk quickly, and baffle its pursuit by turning sharp corners, and plunging into devious streets and crooked lanes, and so lose it!