difference would have been that, brandishing his dignities over his head
as in a parchment scroll, he might then--that is in the heroic time--have
proceeded downstairs with a drawn sword in his other grasp.

At present, really, the light he had set down on the mantel of the next
room would have to figure his sword; which utensil, in the course of a
minute, he had taken the requisite number of steps to possess himself of.
The door between the rooms was open, and from the second another door
opened to a third. These rooms, as he remembered, gave all three upon a
common corridor as well, but there was a fourth, beyond them, without
issue save through the preceding. To have moved, to have heard his step
again, was appreciably a help; though even in recognising this he
lingered once more a little by the chimney-piece on which his light had
rested. When he next moved, just hesitating where to turn, he found
himself considering a circumstance that, after his first and
comparatively vague apprehension of it, produced in him the start that
often attends some pang of recollection, the violent shock of having
ceased happily to forget. He had come into sight of the door in which
the brief chain of communication ended and which he now surveyed from the
nearer threshold, the one not directly facing it. Placed at some
distance to the left of this point, it would have admitted him to the
last room of the four, the room without other approach or egress, had it
not, to his intimate conviction, been closed _since_ his former
visitation, the matter probably of a quarter of an hour before. He
stared with all his eyes at the wonder of the fact, arrested again where
he stood and again holding his breath while he sounded his sense. Surely
it had been _subsequently_ closed--that is it had been on his previous
passage indubitably open!

He took it full in the face that something had happened between--that he