applause, for the felt fact, was so eager, since, if it was his other
self he was running to earth, this ineffable identity was thus in the
last resort not unworthy of him. It bristled there--somewhere near at
hand, however unseen still--as the hunted thing, even as the trodden worm
of the adage must at last bristle; and Brydon at this instant tasted
probably of a sensation more complex than had ever before found itself
consistent with sanity. It was as if it would have shamed him that a
character so associated with his own should triumphantly succeed in just
skulking, should to the end not risk the open; so that the drop of this
danger was, on the spot, a great lift of the whole situation. Yet with
another rare shift of the same subtlety he was already trying to measure
by how much more he himself might now be in peril of fear; so rejoicing
that he could, in another form, actively inspire that fear, and
simultaneously quaking for the form in which he might passively know it.

The apprehension of knowing it must after a little have grown in him, and
the strangest moment of his adventure perhaps, the most memorable or
really most interesting, afterwards, of his crisis, was the lapse of
certain instants of concentrated conscious _combat_, the sense of a need
to hold on to something, even after the manner of a man slipping and
slipping on some awful incline; the vivid impulse, above all, to move, to
act, to charge, somehow and upon something--to show himself, in a word,
that he wasn't afraid. The state of "holding on" was thus the state to
which he was momentarily reduced; if there had been anything, in the
great vacancy, to seize, he would presently have been aware of having
clutched it as he might under a shock at home have clutched the nearest
chair-back. He had been surprised at any rate--of this he _was_
aware--into something unprecedented since his original appropriation of
the place; he had closed his eyes, held them tight, for a long minute, as
with that instinct of dismay and that terror of vision. When he opened