ght of
convenience that he hated, he had thrown himself without undressing. He
stared at the buried day and wore out the time; with the arrival of the
Christmas dawn moreover, late and grey, he felt himself somehow
determined. The common wisdom had had its say to him--that safety in
doubt was _not_ action; and perhaps what most helped him was this very
commonness. In his case there was nothing of _that_--in no case in his
life had there ever been less: which association, from one thing to
another, now worked for him as a choice. He acted, after his bath and
his breakfast, in the sense of that marked element of the rare which he
felt to be the sign of his crisis. And that is why, dressed with more
state than usual and quite as if for church, he went out into the soft
Christmas day.

Action, for him, on coming to the point, it appeared, carried with it a
certain complexity. We should have known, walking by his side, that his
final prime decision hadn't been to call at the door of Sir Luke
Strett, and yet that this step, though subordinate, was none the less
urgent. His prime decision was for another matter, to which impatience,
once he was on the way, had now added itself; but he remained
sufficiently aware that he must compromise with the perhaps excessive
earliness. This, and the ferment set up within him, were together a
reason for not driving; to say nothing of the absence of cabs in the
dusky festal desert. Sir Luke's great square was not near, but he
walked the Distance without seeing a hansom. He had his interval thus
to turn over his view--the view to which what had happened the night
before had not sharply reduced itself; but the complexity just
mentioned was to be offered within the next few minutes another item to
assimilate. Before Sir Luke's house, when he reached it, a brougham was
drawn up--at the sight of which his heart had a lift that brought him
for the instant to a stand. This pause wasn't long, but it was long
enough to flash upon him a revelation in the light of which he caught
his breath. The carriage, so possibly at such an hour and on such a day
Sir Luke's own, had struck him as a sign that the great doctor was
back. This would prove something else, in turn, still more intensely,
and it was in the act of the double apprehension that Densher felt
himself turn pale. His mind rebounded for the moment like a projectile
that has suddenly been met by another: he stared at the strange truth
that what he