shades and the parts at the back. But if he sometimes, on his
rounds, was glad of his optical reach, so none the less often the

rear of the house affected him as the very jungle of his prey. The
place was there more subdivided; a large "extension" in particular,

where small rooms for servants had been multiplied, abounded in
nooks and corners, in closets and passages, in the ramifications

especially of an ample back staircase over which he leaned, many a
time, to look far down - not deterred from his gravity even while

aware that he might, for a spectator, have figured some solemn
simpleton playing at hide-and-seek. Outside in fact he might

himself make that ironic RAPPROCHEMENT; but within the walls, and
in spite of the clear windows, his consistency was proof against

the cynical light of New York.
It had belonged to that idea of the exasperated consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness of

his victim to become a real test for him; since he had quite put it
to himself from the first that, oh distinctly! he could "cultivate"

his whole perception. He had felt it as above all open to
cultivation - which indeed was but another name for his manner of

spending his time. He was bringing it on, bringing it to
perfection, by practice; in consequence of which it had grown so

fine that he was now aware of impressions, attestations of his
general postulate, that couldn't have broken upon him at once.

This was the case more specifically with a phenomenon at last quite
frequent for him in the upper rooms, the recognition - absolutely

unmistakeable, and by a turn dating from a particular hour, his
resumption of his campaign after a diplomatic drop, a calculated

absence of three nights - of his being definitely followed, tracked
at a distance carefully taken and to the express end that he should

the less confidently, less arrogantly, appear to himself merely to
pursue. It worried, it finally quite broke him up, for it proved,

of all the conceivableimpressions, the one least suited to his
book. He was kept in sight while remaining himself - as regards

the essence of his position - sightless, and his only recourse then
was in abrupt turns, rapid recoveries of ground. He wheeled about,

retracing his steps, as if he might so catch in his face at least
the stirred air of some other quick revolution. It was indeed true

that his fully dislocalised thought of these manoeuvres recalled to
him Pantaloon, at the Christmas farce, buffeted and tricked from

behind by ubiquitous Harlequin; but it left intact the influence of
the conditions themselves each time he was re-exposed to them, so

that in fact this association, had he suffered it to become
constant, would on a certain side have but ministered to his

intenser gravity. He had made, as I have said, to create on the
premises the baseless sense of a reprieve, his three absences; and

the result of the third was to confirm the after-effect of the
second.

On his return that night - the night succeeding his last
intermission - he stood in the hall and looked up the staircase

with a certainty more intimate than any he had yet known. "He's
THERE, at the top, and waiting - not, as in general, falling back

for disappearance. He's holding his ground, and it's the first
time - which is a proof, isn't it? that something has happened for

him." So Brydon argued with his hand on the banister and his foot
on the lowest stair; in which position he felt as never before the

air chilled by his logic. He himself turned cold in it, for he
seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. "Harder pressed?

- yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that I've
come, as they say, 'to stay.' He finally doesn't like and can't

bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced
interest, now balances with his dread. I've hunted him till he has

'turned'; that, up there, is what has happened - he's the fanged or
the antlered animal brought at last to bay." There came to him, as

I say - but determined by an influence beyond my notation! - the
acuteness of this certainty; under which however the next moment he

had broken into a sweat that he would as little have consented to
attribute to fear as he would have dared immediately to act upon it

for enterprise. It marked none the less a prodigiousthrill, a
thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but also

represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most
joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication

of consciousness" target="_blank" title="n.意识；觉悟；知觉">consciousness.
"He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to

anger, he'll fight!" - this intenseimpression made a single
mouthful, as it were, of terror and applause. But what was

wondrous was that the applause, for the felt fact, was so eager,
since, if it was his other self he was running to earth, this

ineffable identity was thus in the last resort not worthy" target="_blank" title="a.不值得的；不足道的">unworthy of him.
It bristled there - somewhere near at hand, however unseen still -

as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm of the adage must at
last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted probably of a

sensation more complex than had ever before found itself consistent
with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a

character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in
just skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the

drop of this danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole
situation. Yet with another rare shift of the same subtlety he was

already trying to measure by how much more he himself might now be
in peril of fear; so rejoicing that he could, in another form,

actively inspire that fear, and simultaneously quaking for the form
in which he might passively know it.

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in
him, and the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most

memorable or really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis,
was the lapse of certain instants of concentrated conscious COMBAT,

the sense of a need to hold on to something, even after the manner
of a man slipping and slipping on some awful incline; the vivid

impulse, above all, to move, to act, to charge, somehow and upon
something - to show himself, in a word, that he wasn't afraid. The

state of "holding on" was thus the state to which he was
momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the great

vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having
clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the

nearest chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate - of this he
WAS aware - into something unprecedented since his original

appropriation of the place; he had closed his eyes, held them
tight, for a long minute, as with that instinct of dismay and that

terror of vision. When he opened them the room, the other
contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, 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