ich, again and
again, he found himself hoping most. Then he could, as seemed to him,
most intimately wander and wait, linger and listen, feel his fine
attention, never in his life before so fine, on the pulse of the great
vague place: he preferred the lampless hour and only wished he might have
prolonged each day the deep crepuscular spell. Later--rarely much before
midnight, but then for a considerable vigil--he watched with his
glimmering light; moving slowly, holding it high, playing it far,
rejoicing above all, as much as he might, in open vistas, reaches of
communication between rooms and by passages; the long straight chance or
show, as he would have called it, for the revelation he pretended to
invite. It was a practice he found he could perfectly "work" without
exciting remark; no one was in the least the wiser for it; even Alice
Staverton, who was moreover a well of discretion, didn't quite fully
imagine.

He let himself in and let himself out with the assurance of calm
proprietorship; and accident so far favoured him that, if a fat Avenue
"officer" had happened on occasion to see him entering at eleven-thirty,
he had never yet, to the best of his belief, been noticed as emerging at
two. He walked there on the crisp November nights, arrived regularly at
the evening's end; it was as easy to do this after dining out as to take
his way to a club or to his hotel. When he left his club, if he hadn't
been dining out, it was ostensibly to go to his hotel; and when he left
his hotel, if he had spent a part of the evening there, it was ostensibly
to go to his club. Everything was easy in fine; everything conspired and
promoted: there was truly even in the strain of his experience something
that glossed over, something that salved and simplified, all the rest of
consciousness. He circulated, talked, renewed, loosely and pleasantly,
old relations--met indeed, so far as he could, new expectations and
seemed to make out on the whole that in spite of the career, of such
different contacts, which he had spoken of to Miss Staverton as
ministering so little, for those who might have watched it, to
edification, he was positively rather liked than not. He was a dim
secondary social success--and all with people who had truly not an idea
of him. It was all mere surface sound, this murmur of their welcome,
this popping of their corks--just as his gestures of response were the
extravagant shadows, emphatic in proportion as t