holding his ground, and it's the first time--which is a proof, isn't it?
that something has happened for him." So Brydon argued with his hand on
the banister and his foot on the lowest stair; in which position he felt
as never before the air chilled by his logic. He himself turned cold in
it, for he seemed of a sudden to know what now was involved. "Harder
pressed?--yes, he takes it in, with its thus making clear to him that
I've come, as they say, 'to stay.' He finally doesn't like and can't
bear it, in the sense, I mean, that his wrath, his menaced interest, now
balances with his dread. I've hunted him till he has 'turned'; that, up
there, is what has happened--he's the fanged or the antlered animal
brought at last to bay." There came to him, as I say--but determined by
an influence beyond my notation!--the acuteness of this certainty; under
which however the next moment he had broken into a sweat that he would as
little have consented to attribute to fear as he would have dared
immediately to act upon it for enterprise. It marked none the less a
prodigious thrill, a thrill that represented sudden dismay, no doubt, but
also represented, and with the selfsame throb, the strangest, the most
joyous, possibly the next minute almost the proudest, duplication of
consciousness.

"He has been dodging, retreating, hiding, but now, worked up to anger,
he'll fight!"--this intense impression made a single mouthful, as it
were, of terror and applause. But what was wondrous was that the
applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other
self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the
last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there--somewhere near at
hand, however unseen still--as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm
of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted
probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself
consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just
skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this
danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation. Yet with
another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure
by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing
that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and
simultaneously quaking for the for