confidence, that if I stood my ground a minute I should cease--for
the time, at least--to have him to reckon with; and during the minute,
accordingly, the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have met alone, in
the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy, some adventurer,
some criminal. It was the dead silence of our long gaze at such close
quarters that gave the whole horror, huge as it was, its only note of
the unnatural. If I had met a murderer in such a place and at such an
hour, we still at least would have spoken. Something would have passed,
in life, between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little more to
make me doubt if even _I_ were in life. I can't express what followed it
save by saying that the silence itself--which was indeed in a manner
an attestation of my strength--became the element into which I saw the
figure disappear; in which I definitely saw it turn as I might have
seen the low wretch to which it had once belonged turn on receipt of an
order, and pass, with my eyes on the villainous back that no hunch could
have more disfigured, straight down the staircase and into the darkness
in which the next bend was lost.

X

I remained awhile at the top of the stair, but with the effect presently
of understanding that when my visitor had gone, he had gone: then I
returned to my room. The foremost thing I saw there by the light of the
candle I had left burning was that Flora's little bed was empty; and on
this I caught my breath with all the terror that, five minutes before,
I had been able to resist. I dashed at the place in which I had left her
lying and over which (for the small silk counterpane and the sheets were
disarranged) the white curtains had been deceivingly pulled forward;
then my step, to my unutterable relief, produced an answering sound: I
perceived an agitation of the window blind, and the child, ducking down,
emerged rosily from the other side of it. She stood there in so much of
her candor and so little of her nightgown, with her pink bare feet and
the golden glow of her curls. She looked intensely grave, and I had
never had such a sense of losing an advantage acquired (the thrill
of which had just been so prodigious) as on my consciousness that
she addressed me with a reproach. "You naughty: where HAVE you
been?"--instead of challeng