and the person took this
way when he took this way."

"What sort of person?"

The watchman had not particularly noticed; he should say a working
person; to the best of his belief, he had a dust-colored kind of clothes
on, under a dark coat. The watchman made more light of the matter than I
did, and naturally; not having my reason for attaching weight to it.

When I had got rid of him, which I thought it well to do without
prolonging explanations, my mind was much troubled by these two
circumstances taken together. Whereas they were easy of innocent
solution apart,--as, for instance, some diner out or diner at home,
who had not gone near this watchman's gate, might have strayed to my
staircase and dropped asleep there,--and my nameless visitor might have
brought some one with him to show him the way,--still, joined, they had
an ugly look to one as prone to distrust and fear as the changes of a
few hours had made me.

I lighted my fire, which burnt with a raw pale flare at that time of the
morning, and fell into a doze before it. I seemed to have been dozing a
whole night when the clocks struck six. As there was full an hour and
a half between me and daylight, I dozed again; now, waking up uneasily,
with prolix conversations about nothing, in my ears; now, making thunder
of the wind in the chimney; at length, falling off into a profound sleep
from which the daylight woke me with a start.

All this time I had never been able to consider my own situation, nor
could I do so yet. I had not the power to attend to it. I was greatly
dejected and distressed, but in an incoherent wholesale sort of way.
As to forming any plan for the future, I could as soon have formed an
elephant. When I opened the shutters and looked out at the wet wild
morning, all of a leaden hue; when I walked from room to room; when I
sat down again shivering, before the fire, waiting for my laundress to
appear; I thought how miserable I was, but hardly knew why, or how long
I had been so, or on what day of the week I made the reflection, or even
who I was that made it.

At last, the old woman and the niece came in,--the latter with a head
not easily distinguishable from her dusty broom,--and testified surprise
at sight of me and the fire. To whom I imparted how my uncle had come in
the night and was then asleep, and how the breakfast preparations were
to be modified accordingly. Then I washed and dressed while they knocked
the furniture about and mad