re wide empty walls there was a tie,
mournful, but hard to rend asunder, connected with a double childhood,
and a double loss. He had thought to leave the house--knowing he must
go, not knowing whither--upon the evening of the day on which this
feeling first struck root in his breast; but he resolved to stay another
night, and in the night to ramble through the rooms once more.

He came out of his solitude when it was the dead of night, and with
a candle in his hand went softly up the stairs. Of all the footmarks
there, making them as common as the common street, there was not one, he
thought, but had seemed at the time to set itself upon his brain while
he had kept close, listening. He looked at their number, and their
hurry, and contention--foot treading foot out, and upward track and
downward jostling one another--and thought, with absolute dread and
wonder, how much he must have suffered during that trial, and what
a changed man he had cause to be. He thought, besides, oh was there,
somewhere in the world, a light footstep that might have worn out in a
moment half those marks!--and bent his head, and wept as he went up.

He almost saw it, going on before. He stopped, looking up towards the
skylight; and a figure, childish itself, but carrying a child, and
singing as it went, seemed to be there again. Anon, it was the same
figure, alone, stopping for an instant, with suspended breath; the
bright hair clustering loosely round its tearful face; and looking back
at him.

He wandered through the rooms: lately so luxurious; now so bare and
dismal and so changed, apparently, even in their shape and size. The
press of footsteps was as thick here; and the same consideration of the
suffering he had had, perplexed and terrified him. He began to fear
that all this intricacy in his brain would drive him mad; and that his
thoughts already lost coherence as the footprints did, and were pieced
on to one another, with the same trackless involutions, and varieties of
indistinct shapes.

He did not so much as know in which of these rooms she had lived, when
she was alone. He was glad to leave them, and go wandering higher up.
Abundance of associations were here, connected with his false wife, his
false friend and servant, his false grounds of pride; but he put
them all by now, and only recalled miserably, weakly, fondly, his two
children.

Everywhere, the footsteps! They had had no respect for the old room high
up, where the lit