it idle henceforth that he should ever come back. The empty street--its
other life so marked even by great lamp-lit vacancy--was within call,
within touch; he stayed there as to be in it again, high above it though
he was still perched; he watched as for some comforting common fact, some
vulgar human note, the passage of a scavenger or a thief, some night-bird
however base. He would have blessed that sign of life; he would have
welcomed positively the slow approach of his friend the policeman, whom
he had hitherto only sought to avoid, and was not sure that if the patrol
had come into sight he mightn't have felt the impulse to get into
relation with it, to hail it, on some pretext, from his fourth floor.

The pretext that wouldn't have been too silly or too compromising, the
explanation that would have saved his dignity and kept his name, in such
a case, out of the papers, was not definite to him: he was so occupied
with the thought of recording his Discretion--as an effect of the vow he
had just uttered to his intimate adversary--that the importance of this
loomed large and something had overtaken all ironically his sense of
proportion. If there had been a ladder applied to the front of the
house, even one of the vertiginous perpendiculars employed by painters
and roofers and sometimes left standing overnight, he would have managed
somehow, astride of the window-sill, to compass by outstretched leg and
arm that mode of descent. If there had been some such uncanny thing as
he had found in his room at hotels, a workable fire-escape in the form of
notched cable or a canvas shoot, he would have availed himself of it as a
proof--well, of his present delicacy. He nursed that sentiment, as the
question stood, a little in vain, and even--at the end of he scarce knew,
once more, how long--found it, as by the action on his mind of the
failure of response of the outer world, sinking back to vague anguish. It
seemed to him he had waited an age for some stir of the great grim hush;
the life of the town was itself under a spell--so unnaturally, up and