Without it, the next instant, I saw that there was someone on the stair.
I speak of sequences, but I required no lapse of seconds to stiffen
myself for a third encounter with Quint. The apparition had reached
the landing halfway up and was therefore on the spot nearest the window,
where at sight of me, it stopped short and fixed me exactly as it had fixed
me from the tower and from the garden. He knew me as well as I knew him;
and so, in the cold, faint twilight, with a glimmer in the high glass
and another on the polish of the oak stair below, we faced each
other in our common intensity. He was absolutely, on this occasion,
a living, detestable, dangerous presence. But that was not the wonder
of wonders; I reserve this distinction for quite another circumstance:
the circumstance that dread had unmistakably quitted me and that there
was nothing in me there that didn't meet and measure him.

I had plenty of anguish after that extraordinary moment,
but I had, thank God, no terror. And he knew I had not--I found
myself at the end of an instant magnificently aware of this.
I felt, in a fierce rigor of confidence, that if I stood
my ground a minute I should cease--for the time, at least--
to have him to reckon with; and during the minute, accordingly,
the thing was as human and hideous as a real interview:
hideous just because it WAS human, as human as to have
met alone, in the small hours, in a sleeping house, some enemy,
some adventurer, some criminal. It was the dead silence of our
long gaze at such close quarters that gave the whole horror,
huge as it was, its only note of the unnatural. If I had met
a murderer in such a place and at such an hour, we still at
least would have spoken. Something would have passed, in life,
between us; if nothing had passed, one of us would have moved.
The moment was so prolonged that it would have taken but little