hey meant little, of some
game of _ombres chinoises_. He projected himself all day, in thought,
straight over the bristling line of hard unconscious heads and into the
other, the real, the waiting life; the life that, as soon as he had heard
behind him the click of his great house-door, began for him, on the jolly
corner, as beguilingly as the slow opening bars of some rich music
follows the tap of the conductor's wand.

He always caught the first effect of the steel point of his stick on the
old marble of the hall pavement, large black-and-white squares that he
remembered as the admiration of his childhood and that had then made in
him, as he now saw, for the growth of an early conception of style. This
effect was the dim reverberating tinkle as of some far-off bell hung who
should say where?--in the depths of the house, of the past, of that
mystical other world that might have flourished for him had he not, for
weal or woe, abandoned it. On this impression he did ever the same
thing; he put his stick noiselessly away in a corner--feeling the place
once more in the likeness of some great glass bowl, all precious concave
crystal, set delicately humming by the play of a moist finger round its
edge. The concave crystal held, as it were, this mystical other world,
and the indescribably fine murmur of its rim was the sigh there, the
scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled
forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his
hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as
they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but
they weren't really sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto
felt them--before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them
take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting
on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from
storey to storey.

That was the essence of his vision--which was all rank folly, if one
would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which
took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He
knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a
cheque presented in demand for cash. His _alter ego_ "walked"--that was
the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own
odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed,
slowly, warily, but all