The exception--which turned me cold--was the form of a yellow mastiff
dog, curled on a mat beneath the table. The arch of his back was
towards me, and one forepaw lay over his nose in a natural posture of
sleep. I leant back on the wainscoting, with my eyes tightly fixed
on him, and my thoughts flying back, with something of regret, to the
storm I had come through.

But a man's habits are not easily denied. At the end of three minutes
the dog had not moved, and I was down on the doormat unlacing my
soaked boots. Slipping them off, and taking them in my left hand, I
stood up, and tried a step towards the stairs, with eyes alert for
any movement of the mastiff; but he never stirred. I was glad enough,
however, on reaching the stairs, to find them newly built and the
carpet thick. Up I went with a glance at every step for the table
which now hid the brute's form from me, and never a creak did I wake
out of that staircase till I was almost at the first landing, when my
toe caught a loose stair-rod, and rattled it in a way that stopped my
heart for a moment, and then set it going in double-quick time.

[Illustration: "HE STOOD SIDEWAYS, ... AND LOOKED AT ME OVER HIS LEFT
SHOULDER."]

I stood still, with a hand on the rail. My eyes were now on a level
with the floor of the landing, out of which branched two passages--one
by my right hand, the other to the left, at the foot of the next
flight, so placed that I was gazing down the length of it. And almost
at the end there fell a parallelogram of light across it from an open
door.

A man who has once felt it knows there is only one kind of silence