you see what it has made of me."

She just waited, smiling at him. "You see what it has made of ME."
"Oh you're a person whom nothing can have altered. You were born

to be what you are, anywhere, anyway: you've the perfection
nothing else could have blighted. And don't you see how, without

my exile, I shouldn't have been waiting till now - ?" But he
pulled up for the strange pang.

"The great thing to see," she presently said, "seems to me to be
that it has spoiled nothing. It hasn't spoiled your being here at

last. It hasn't spoiled this. It hasn't spoiled your speaking - "
She also however faltered.

He wondered at everything her controlled emotion might mean. "Do
you believe then - too dreadfully! - that I AM as good as I might

ever have been?"
"Oh no! Far from it!" With which she got up from her chair and

was nearer to him. "But I don't care," she smiled.
"You mean I'm good enough?"

She considered a little. "Will you believe it if I say so? I mean
will you let that settle your question for you?" And then as if

making out in his face that he drew back from this, that he had
some idea which, however absurd, he couldn't yet bargain away: "Oh

you don't care either - but very differently: you don't care for
anything but yourself."

Spencer Brydon recognised it - it was in fact what he had
absolutely professed. Yet he importantly qualified. "HE isn't

myself. He's the just so totally other person. But I do want to
see him," he added. "And I can. And I shall."

Their eyes met for a minute while he guessed from something in hers
that she divined his strange sense. But neither of them otherwise

expressed it, and her apparent understanding, with no protesting
shock, no easy derision, touched him more deeply than anything yet,

constituting for his stifled perversity, on the spot, an element
that was like breatheable air. What she said however was

unexpected. "Well, I'VE seen him."
"You -?"

"I've seen him in a dream."
"Oh a 'dream' - !" It let him down.

"But twice over," she continued. "I saw him as I see you now."
"You've dreamed the same dream - ?"

"Twice over," she repeated. "The very same."
This did somehow a little speak to him, as it also gratified him.

"You dream about me at that rate?"
"Ah about HIM!" she smiled.

His eyes again sounded her. "Then you know all about him." And as
she said nothing more: "What's the wretch like?"

She hesitated, and it was as if he were pressing her so hard that,
resisting for reasons of her own, she had to turn away. "I'll tell

you some other time!"
CHAPTER II

It was after this that there was most of a virtue for him, most of
a cultivated charm, most of a preposterous secret thrill, in the

particular form of surrender to his obsession and of address to
what he more and more believed to be his privilege. It was what in

these weeks he was living for - since he really felt life to begin
but after Mrs. Muldoon had retired from the scene and, visiting the

ample house from attic to cellar, making sure he was alone, he knew
himself in safe possession and, as he tacitly expressed it, let

himself go. He sometimes came twice in the twenty-four hours; the
moments he liked best were those of gathering dusk, of the short

autumn twilight; this was the time of which, again and again, he
found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him, most

intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine
attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the

great vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished
he might have prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later

- rarely much before midnight, but then for a considerable vigil -
he watched with his glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it

high, playing it far, rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in
open vistas, reaches of communication between rooms and by

passages; the long straight chance or show, as he would have called
it, for the revelation he pretended to invite. It was a practice

he found he could perfectly "work" without exciting remark; no one
was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice Staverton, who was

moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully imagine.
He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm

proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat
Avenue "officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at

eleven-thirty, he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been
noticed as emerging at two. He walked there on the crisp November

nights, arrived regularly at the evening's end; it was as easy to
do this after dining out as to take his way to a club or to his

hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't been dining out, it was
ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left his hotel, if he

had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly to go to
his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and

promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience
something that glossed over, something that salved and simplified,

all the rest of consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed,
loosely and pleasantly, old relations - met indeed, so far as he

could, new expectations and seemed to make out on the whole that in
spite of the career, of such different contacts, which he had

spoken of to Miss Staverton as ministering so little, for those who
might have watched it, to edification, he was positively rather

liked than not. He was a dim secondary social success - and all
with people who had truly not an idea of him. It was all mere

surface sound, this murmur of their welcome, this popping of their
corks - just as his gestures of response were the extravagant

shadows, emphatic in proportion as they meant little, of some game
of OMBRES CHINOISES. He projected himself all day, in thought,

straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into
the other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he

had heard behind him the click of his great house-door, began for
him, on the jolly corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars

of some rich music follows the tap of the conductor's wand.
He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick

on the old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white
squares that he remembered as the admiration of his childhood and

that had then made in him, as he now saw, for the growth of an
early conception of style. This effect was the dim reverberating

tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who should say where? - in the
depths of the house, of the past, of that mystical other world that

might have flourished for him had he not, for weal or woe,
abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same thing; he

put his stick noiselessly away in a corner - feeling the place once
more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave

crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round
its edge. The concavecrystal held, as it were, this mystical

other world, and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the
sigh there, the scarceaudiblepathetic wail to his strained ear,

of all the old baffled forsworn possibilities. What he did
therefore by this appeal of his hushed presence was to wake them

into such measure of ghostly life as they might still enjoy. They
were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but they weren't really

sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto felt them -
before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them take, the

Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting on
tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from

storey to storey.
That was the essence of his vision - which was all rank folly, if

one would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied,
but which took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed

and posted. He knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as
clear as the figure on a cheque presented in demand for cash. His

ALTER EGO "walked" - that was the note of his image of him, while
his image of his motive for his own odd pastime was the desire to

waylay him and meet him. He roamed, slowly, warily, but all
restlessly, he himself did - Mrs. Muldoon had been right,

absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence he
watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious

and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already
quite sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from