scarce audible pathetic wail to his strained ear, of all the old baffled
forsworn possibilities. What he did therefore by this appeal of his
hushed presence was to wake them into such measure of ghostly life as
they might still enjoy. They were shy, all but unappeasably shy, but
they weren't really sinister; at least they weren't as he had hitherto
felt them--before they had taken the Form he so yearned to make them
take, the Form he at moments saw himself in the light of fairly hunting
on tiptoe, the points of his evening shoes, from room to room and from
storey to storey.

That was the essence of his vision--which was all rank folly, if one
would, while he was out of the house and otherwise occupied, but which
took on the last verisimilitude as soon as he was placed and posted. He
knew what he meant and what he wanted; it was as clear as the figure on a
cheque presented in demand for cash. His _alter ego_ "walked"--that was
the note of his image of him, while his image of his motive for his own
odd pastime was the desire to waylay him and meet him. He roamed,
slowly, warily, but all restlessly, he himself did--Mrs. Muldoon had been
right, absolutely, with her figure of their "craping"; and the presence
he watched for would roam restlessly too. But it would be as cautious
and as shifty; the conviction of its probable, in fact its already quite
sensible, quite audible evasion of pursuit grew for him from night to
night, laying on him finally a rigour to which nothing in his life had
been comparable. It had been the theory of many superficially-judging
persons, he knew, that he was wasting that life in a surrender to
sensations, but he had tasted of no pleasure so fine as his actual
tension, had been introduced to no sport that demanded at once the
patience and the nerve of this stalking of a creature more subtle, yet at
bay perhaps more formidable, than any beast of the forest. The terms,
the comparisons, the very practices of the chase positively came again