and this time, as
much as one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not
before, the question of courage--for what he knew the blank face of the
door to say to him was "Show us how much you have!" It stared, it glared
back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives:
should he just push it open or not? Oh to have this consciousness was to
_think_--and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the
lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted--that was the
misery and the pang--was even still not to act; was in fact _all_ to feel
the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause
and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it;
for his vibration had already changed--as just by the effect of its
intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the
thing palpably proveably _done_, thus giving notice like some stark
signboard--under that accession of accent the situation itself had
turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had
turned to.

It had turned altogether to a different admonition; to a supreme hint,
for him, of the value of Discretion! This slowly dawned, no doubt--for
it could take its time; so perfectly, on his threshold, had he been
stayed, so little as yet had he either advanced or retreated. It was the
strangest of all things that now when, by his taking ten steps and
applying his hand to a latch, or even his shoulder and his knee, if
necessary, to a panel, all the hunger of his prime need might have been
met, his high curiosity crowned, his unrest assuaged--it was amazing, but
it was also exquisite and rare, that insistence should have, at a touch,
quite dropped from him. Discretion--he jumped at that; and yet not,
verily, at such a pitch, because it saved his nerves or his skin, but
because, much more valuably, it saved the situation. When I say he
"jumped" at it I feel the consonance of this term with the fact that--at
the end indeed of I know not how long--he did move again, he crossed
straight to the door. He wouldn't touch it--it seemed now that he might
if he would: he would only just wait there a little, to show, to prove,
that he wouldn't. He had thus another station, close to the thin
partition by which revelation was denied him; but with his eyes bent and
his hands held off in a mere intensity of stillness. He listened as if
there had been something to