modern master could have presented
him with more intensity, thrust him out of his frame with more art, as if
there had been "treatment," of the consummate sort, in his every shade
and salience. The revulsion, for our friend, had become, before he knew
it, immense--this drop, in the act of apprehension, to the sense of his
adversary's inscrutable manoeuvre. That meaning at least, while he
gaped, it offered him; for he could but gape at his other self in this
other anguish, gape as a proof that _he_, standing there for the
achieved, the enjoyed, the triumphant life, couldn't be faced in his
triumph. Wasn't the proof in the splendid covering hands, strong and
completely spread?--so spread and so intentional that, in spite of a
special verity that surpassed every other, the fact that one of these
hands had lost two fingers, which were reduced to stumps, as if
accidentally shot away, the face was effectually guarded and saved.

"Saved," though, _would_ it be?--Brydon breathed his wonder till the very
impunity of his attitude and the very insistence of his eyes produced, as
he felt, a sudden stir which showed the next instant as a deeper portent,
while the head raised itself, the betrayal of a braver purpose. The
hands, as he looked, began to move, to open; then, as if deciding in a
flash, dropped from the face and left it uncovered and presented. Horror,
with the sight, had leaped into Brydon's throat, gasping there in a sound
he couldn't utter; for the bared identity was too hideous as _his_, and
his glare was the passion of his protest. The face, _that_ face, Spencer
Brydon's?--he searched it still, but looking away from it in dismay and
denial, falling straight from his height of sublimity. It was unknown,
inconceivable, awful, disconnected from any possibility!--He had been
"sold," he inwardly moaned, stalking such game as this: the presence
before him was a presence, the horror within him a horror, but the waste
of his nights had been only grotesque and the success of his adventure an
irony. Such an identity fitted his at _no_ point, made its alternative
monstrous. A thousand times yes, as it came upon him nearer now, the
face was the face of a stranger. It came upon him nearer now, quite as
one of those expanding fantastic images projected by the magic lantern of
childhood; for the stranger, whoever he might be, evil, odious, blatant,
vulgar, had advanced as for aggression, and he knew himself give ground.
Th