e windows were properly barred
and fastened, and went into the hall on his way to bed.

He looked at the front door, tried the chain, and made sure that both
top and bottom bolts were thrown. Why he should have taken these
somewhat unusual precautions was not far to seek, though at the moment
he could not probably have explained. The desire for protection was
awake in his being, and he took these measures of security and defense
because it sought to express itself, as it were, even automatically.
Spinrobin was afraid.

Up the broad staircase he went softly with his lighted candle, leaving
the great hall behind him full to the brim with shadows--shadows that
moved and took shape. His own head and shoulders in monstrous outline
poured over the walls and upper landings, and thence leaped to the
skylight overhead. As he passed the turn in the stairs, the dark
contents of the hall below rushed past in a single mass, like an
immense extended wing, and settled abruptly at his back, following him
thence to the landing.

Once there, he went more quickly, moving on tiptoe, and so reached his
own room halfway down. He passed two doors to get there; another two lay
beyond; all four, as he believed, being always locked. It was these four
rooms that conjured mightily with his imagination always, for these were
the rooms he pictured to himself, though without a vestige of proof, as
being occupied. It was from the further ones--one or other of them--he
believed Mr. Skale came when he had passed down the corridor at two in
the morning, stealthily, hurriedly, on the heels of that rush of sound
that made him shake in his bed as he heard it.

In his own room, however, surrounded by the familiar and personal objects
that reminded him of normal life, he felt more at home. He undressed
quickly, all his candles alight, and then sat before the fire in the
armchair to read a little before getting into bed.

And he read for choice Hebrew--Hebrew poetry, and on this particular
occasion, the books of Job and Ezekiel. For nothing had so soothing and
calming an effect upon him as the mighty yet simple imagery of these
sonorous stanzas; they invariably took him "out of himself," or at any
rate out of the region of small personal alarms. And thus, letting his
fancy roam, it seems, he was delighted to find that gradually the fears
which had dominated him during the day and evening disappeared. He passed
with the poetry into that region of high adve