When the two were gone and the house was still, Henry would sit up in
bed and listen; then, moving quietly, he would creep out and listen
again.

There, in the passage, it seemed to him that he could hear the whole
house talking--first one sound and then another would come, the wheeze
of some straining floor, the creak of some whispering board, the shudder
of a door. "Look out! Look out! Look out!" and then, above that murmur,
some louder voice: "Watch! there's danger in the place!" Then, shivering
with cold and his sense of evil, he would creep down into a lower
passage and stand listening again; now the voices of the house were
deafening, rising on every side of him, like the running of little
streams suddenly heard on the turning of the corner of a hill. The dim
light shrouded with fantasy the walls; along the wide passage and
cabinets, high china jars, the hollow scoop of the window at the
far-distant end, were all alive and moving. And, in strange
contradiction to the moving voices within the house, came the blurred
echo of the London life, whirring, buzzing, like a cloud of gnats at the
window-pane. "Look out! Look out! Look out!" the house cried, and Henry,
with chattering teeth, was on guard.

There came an evening when standing thus, shivering in his little shirt,
he was aware that the terror, so long anticipated, was upon him. It
seemed to him, on this evening, that the house was suddenly still; it
was as though all the sounds, as of running water, that passed up and
down the rooms and passages, were, in a flashing second, frozen. The
house was holding its breath.

He had to wait for a breathless, agonising interval before he heard the
next sound, very faint and stifled breathing coming up to him out of the