open? He
could hold to the idea that the closing had practically been for him an
act of mercy, a chance offered him to descend, depart, get off the ground
and never again profane it. This conception held together, it worked;
but what it meant for him depended now clearly on the amount of
forbearance his recent action, or rather his recent inaction, had
engendered. The image of the "presence" whatever it was, waiting there
for him to go--this image had not yet been so concrete for his nerves as
when he stopped short of the point at which certainty would have come to
him. For, with all his resolution, or more exactly with all his dread,
he did stop short--he hung back from really seeing. The risk was too
great and his fear too definite: it took at this moment an awful specific
form.

He knew--yes, as he had never known anything--that, _should_ he see the
door open, it would all too abjectly be the end of him. It would mean
that the agent of his shame--for his shame was the deep abjection--was
once more at large and in general possession; and what glared him thus in
the face was the act that this would determine for him. It would send
him straight about to the window he had left open, and by that window, be
long ladder and dangling rope as absent as they would, he saw himself
uncontrollably insanely fatally take his way to the street. The hideous
chance of this he at least could avert; but he could only avert it by
recoiling in time from assurance. He had the whole house to deal with,
this fact was still there; only he now knew that uncertainty alone could
start him. He stole back from where he had checked himself--merely to do
so was suddenly like safety--and, making blindly for the greater
staircase, left gaping rooms and sounding passages behind. Here was the
top of the stairs, with a fine large dim descent and three spacious
landings to mark off. His instinct was all for mildness, but his feet
were harsh on the floors, and, strangely, when he had in a couple of
minutes become aware of this, it counted somehow for help. He couldn't
have spoken, the tone of his voice would have scared him, and the common
conceit or resource of "whistling in the dark" (whether literally or
figuratively) have appeared basely vulgar; yet he liked none the less to
hear himself go, and when he had reached his first landing--taking it all
with no rush, but quite steadily--that stage of success drew from him a
gasp of relief.

Th