m in which he might passively know it.

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and
the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or
really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of
certain instants of concentrated conscious _combat_, the sense of a need
to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slipping and
slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to
act, to charge, somehow and upon something--to show himself, in a word,
that he wasn't afraid. The state of "holding on" was thus the state to
which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the
great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having
clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the nearest
chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate--of this he _was_
aware--into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of
the place; he had closed his eyes, held them tight, for a long minute, as
with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened
them the room, the other contiguous rooms, extraordinarily, seemed
lighter--so light, almost, that at first he took the change for day. He
stood firm, however that might be, just where he had paused; his
resistance had helped him--it was as if there were something he had tided
over. He knew after a little what this was--it had been in the imminent
danger of flight. He had stiffened his will against going; without this
he would have made for the stairs, and it seemed to him that, still with
his eyes closed, he would have descended them, would have known how,
straight and swiftly, to the bottom.

Well, as he had held out, here he was--still at the top, among the more
intricate upper rooms and with the gauntlet of the others, of all the
rest of the house, still to run when it should be his time to go. He
would go at his time--only at his time: didn't he go every night very
much at the same hour? He took out his watch--there was light for that:
it was scarcely a quarter past one, and he had never withdrawn so soon.
He reached his lodgings for the most part at two--with his walk of a
quarter of an hour. He would wait for the last quarter--he wouldn't stir
till then; and he kept his watch there with his eyes on it, reflecting
while he held it that this deliberate wait, a wait with an effort, which
he recognised, would serve perfectly f