hat is it had been on his previous
passage indubitably open!

He took it full in the face that something had happened between--that he
couldn't have noticed before (by which he meant on his original tour of
all the rooms that evening) that such a barrier had exceptionally
presented itself. He had indeed since that moment undergone an agitation
so extraordinary that it might have muddled for him any earlier view; and
he tried to convince himself that he might perhaps then have gone into
the room and, inadvertently, automatically, on coming out, have drawn the
door after him. The difficulty was that this exactly was what he never
did; it was against his whole policy, as he might have said, the essence
of which was to keep vistas clear. He had them from the first, as he was
well aware, quite on the brain: the strange apparition, at the far end of
one of them, of his baffled "prey" (which had become by so sharp an irony
so little the term now to apply!) was the form of success his imagination
had most cherished, projecting into it always a refinement of beauty. He
had known fifty times the start of perception that had afterwards
dropped; had fifty times gasped to himself. "There!" under some fond
brief hallucination. The house, as the case stood, admirably lent
itself; he might wonder at the taste, the native architecture of the
particular time, which could rejoice so in the multiplication of
doors--the opposite extreme to the modern, the actual almost complete
proscription of them; but it had fairly contributed to provoke this
obsession of the presence encountered telescopically, as he might say,
focused and studied in diminishing perspective and as by a rest for the
elbow.

It was with these considerations that his present attention was
charged--they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous. He
_couldn't_, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn't,
if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been
another agent? Another agent?--he had been catching, as he felt, a
moment back, the very breath of him; but when had he been so close as in
this simple, this logical, this completely personal act? It was so
logical, that is, that one might have _taken_ it for personal; yet for
what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt
his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah this time at last they _were_,
the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence;