lose itself in the vague darkness to which the thin admitted dawn,
glimmering archwise over the whole outer door, made a semicircular

margin, a cold silvery nimbus that seemed to play a little as he
looked - to shift and expand and contract.

It was as if there had been something within it, protected by
indistinctness and corresponding in extent with the opaque surface

behind, the painted panels of the last barrier to his escape, of
which the key was in his pocket. The indistinctness mocked him

even while he stared, affected him as somehow shrouding or
challenging certitude, so that after faltering an instant on his

step he let himself go with the sense that here WAS at last
something to meet, to touch, to take, to know - something all

unnatural and dreadful, but to advance upon which was the condition
for him either of liberation or of supreme defeat. The penumbra,

dense and dark, was the virtual screen of a figure which stood in
it as still as some image erect in a niche or as some black-vizored

sentinel guarding a treasure. Brydon was to know afterwards, was
to recall and make out, the particular thing he had believed during

the rest of his descent. He saw, in its great grey glimmering
margin, the central vagueness diminish, and he felt it to be taking

the very form toward which, for so many days, the passion of his
curiosity had yearned. It gloomed, it loomed, it was something, it

was somebody, the prodigy of a personal presence.
Rigid and conscious, spectral yet human, a man of his own substance

and stature waited there to measure himself with his power to
dismay. This only could it be - this only till he recognised, with

his advance, that what made the face dim was the pair of raised
hands that covered it and in which, so far from being offered in

defiance, it was buried, as for dark deprecation. So Brydon,
before him, took him in; with every fact of him now, in the higher

light, hard and acute - his planted stillness, his vivid truth, his
grizzled bent head and white masking hands, his queer actuality of

evening-dress, of dangling double eye-glass, of gleaming silk
lappet and white linen, of pearl button and gold watch-guard and

polished shoe. No portrait by a great modern master could have
presented him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with

more art, as if there had been "treatment," of the consummate sort,
in his every shade and salience. The revulsion, for our friend,

had become, before he knew it, immense - this drop, in the act of
apprehension, to the sense of his adversary's inscrutable

manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he gaped, it offered him;
for he could but gape at his other self in this other anguish, gape

as a proof that HE, standing there for the achieved, the enjoyed,
the triumphant" target="_blank" title="a.胜利的；洋洋得意的">triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his triumph. Wasn't the

proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and completely spread?
- so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a special verity

that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these hands had
lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if accidentally

shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.
"Saved," though, WOULD it be? - Brydon breathed his wonder till the

very impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes
produced, as he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant

as a deeper portent, while the head raised itself, the betrayal of
a braver purpose. The hands, as he looked, began to move, to open;

then, as if deciding in a flash, dropped from the face and left it
uncovered and presented. Horror, with the sight, had leaped into

Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound he couldn't utter; for
the bared identity was too hideous as HIS, and his glare was the

passion of his protest. The face, THAT face, Spencer Brydon's? -
he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and

denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was
unknown, inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility! -

He had been "sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this:
the presence before him was a presence, the horror within him a

horror, but the waste of his nights had been only grotesque and the
success of his adventure an irony. Such an identity fitted his at

NO point, made its alternativemonstrous. A thousand times yes, as
it came upon him nearer now, the face was the face of a stranger.

It came upon him nearer now, quite as one of those expanding
fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of childhood; for

the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant, vulgar,
had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground.

Then harder pressed still, sick with the force of his shock, and
falling back as under the hot breath and the roused passion of a

life larger than his own, a rage of personality before which his
own collapsed, he felt the whole vision turn to darkness and his

very feet give way. His head went round; he was going; he had
gone.

CHAPTER III
What had next brought him back, clearly - though after how long? -

was Mrs. Muldoon's voice, coming to him from quite near, from so
near that he seemed presently to see her as kneeling on the ground

before him while he lay looking up at her; himself not wholly on
the ground, but half-raised and upheld - conscious, yes, of

tenderness of support and, more particularly, of a head pillowed in
extraordinary softness and faintlyrefreshingfragrance. He

considered, he wondered, his wit but half at his service; then
another face intervened, bending more directly over him, and he

finally knew that Alice Staverton had made her lap an ample and
perfect cushion to him, and that she had to this end seated herself

on the lowest degree of the staircase, the rest of his long person
remaining stretched on his old black-and-white slabs. They were

cold, these marble squares of his youth; but HE somehow was not, in
this rich return of consciousness - the most wonderful hour, little

by little, that he had ever known, leaving him, as it did, so
gratefully, so abysmally passive, and yet as with a treasure of

intelligence waiting all round him for quiet appropriation;
dissolved, he might call it, in the air of the place and producing

the golden glow of a late autumn afternoon. He had come back, yes
- come back from further away than any man but himself had ever

travelled; but it was strange how with this sense what he had come
back TO seemed really the great thing, and as if his prodigious

journey had been all for the sake of it. Slowly but surely his
consciousness grew, his vision of his state thus completing itself;

he had been miraculously CARRIED back - lifted and carefully borne
as from where he had been picked up, the uttermost end of an

interminable grey passage. Even with this he was suffered to rest,
and what had now brought him to knowledge was the break in the long

mild motion.
It had brought him to knowledge, to knowledge - yes, this was the

beauty of his state; which came to resemble more and more that of a
man who has gone to sleep on some news of a great inheritance, and

then, after dreaming it away, after profaning it with matters
strange to it, has waked up again to serenity of certitude and has

only to lie and watch it grow. This was the drift of his patience
- that he had only to let it shine on him. He must moreover, with

intermissions, still have been lifted and borne; since why and how
else should he have known himself, later on, with the afternoon

glow intenser, no longer at the foot of his stairs - situated as
these now seemed at that dark other end of his tunnel - but on a

deep window-bench of his high saloon, over which had been spread,
couch-fashion, a mantle of soft stuff lined with grey fur that was

familiar to his eyes and that one of his hands kept fondly feeling
as for its pledge of truth. Mrs. Muldoon's face had gone, but the

other, the second he had recognised, hung over him in a way that
showed how he was still propped and pillowed. He took it all in,

and the more he took it the more it seemed to suffice: he was as
much at peace as if he had had food and drink. It was the two

women who had found him, on Mrs. Muldoon's having plied, at her
usual hour, her latch-key - and on her having above all arrived

while Miss Staverton still lingered near the house. She had been
turning away, all anxiety, from worrying the vain bell-handle - her