hear, but this attitude, while it lasted, was
his own communication. "If you won't then--good: I spare you and I give
up. You affect me as by the appeal positively for pity: you convince me
that for reasons rigid and sublime--what do I know?--we both of us should
have suffered. I respect them then, and, though moved and privileged as,
I believe, it has never been given to man, I retire, I renounce--never,
on my honour, to try again. So rest for ever--and let _me_!"

That, for Brydon, was the deep sense of this last demonstration--solemn,
measured, directed, as he felt it to be. He brought it to a close, he
turned away; and now verily he knew how deeply he had been stirred. He
retraced his steps, taking up his candle, burnt, he observed, well-nigh
to the socket, and marking again, lighten it as he would, the
distinctness of his footfall; after which, in a moment, he knew himself
at the other side of the house. He did here what he had not yet done at
these hours--he opened half a casement, one of those in the front, and
let in the air of the night; a thing he would have taken at any time
previous for a sharp rupture of his spell. His spell was broken now, and
it didn't matter--broken by his concession and his surrender, which made
it idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street--its
other life so marked even by great lamp-lit vacancy--was within call,
within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again, high above it though
he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some
vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird
however base. He would have blessed that sign of life; he would have
welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom
he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol
had come into sight he mightn't have felt the impulse to get into
relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.

The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising, the
explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name, in such
a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him: he was so occupied
with the thought of recording his Discretion--as an effect of the vow he
had just uttered to his intimate adversary--that the importance of this
loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of
proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front