It was not five yet. He put a few more coals on his fire and blew
out the night-light, and lay down. But it was impossible to rest,
to remain inactive. He would go down and search for that first
volume of Quain. Hallucination, Influenza, Insanity--why, Sheila
must have purposely mislaid it. A rather formidable figure he
looked, descending the stairs in the grey dusk of daybreak. The
breakfast-room was at the back of the house. He tilted the blind,
and a faint light flowed in from the changing colours of the sky.
He opened the glass door of the little bookcase to the right of
the window, and ran eye and finger over the few rows of books.
But as he stood there with his back to the room, just as the
shadow of a bird's wing floats across the moonlight of a pool, he
became suddenly conscious that something, somebody had passed
across the doorway, and in passing had looked in on him.

He stood motionless, listening; but no sound broke the morning
slumbrousness, except the faraway warbling of a thrush in the
first light. So sudden and transitory had been the experience
that it seemed now to be illusory; yet it had so caught him up,
it had with so furtive and sinister a quietness broken in on his
solitude, that for a moment he dared not move. A cold, indefinite
sensation stole over him that he was being watched; that some
dim, evil presence was behind him biding its time, patient and
stealthy, with eyes fixed unmovingly on him where he stood. But,
watch and wait as silently as he might, only the day broadened at
the window, and at last a narrow ray of sunlight stole trembling
up into the dusky bowl of the sky.

At any rate Quain was found, with all the ills of life, from A to