hesitation:

"Nobody; the incident that you have in mind was caused by my folly in
leaving a machine in action with nothing to act upon, while I
undertook the interminable task of enlightening your understanding.
Do you happen to know that Consciousness is the creature of Rhythm?"

"O bother them both!" I replied, rising and laying hold of my
overcoat. "I'm going to wish you good night; and I'll add the hope
that the machine which you inadvertently left in action will have her
gloves on the next time you think it needful to stop her."

Without waiting to observe the effect of my shot I left the house.

Rain was falling, and the darkness was intense. In the sky beyond
the crest of a hill toward which I groped my way along precarious
plank sidewalks and across miry, unpaved streets I could see the
faint glow of the city's lights, but behind me nothing was visible
but a single window of Moxon's house. It glowed with what seemed to
me a mysterious and fateful meaning. I knew it was an uncurtained
aperture in my friend's "machine-shop," and I had little doubt that
he had resumed the studies interrupted by his duties as my instructor
in mechanical consciousness and the fatherhood of Rhythm. Odd, and
in some degree humorous, as his convictions seemed to me at that
time, I could not wholly divest myself of the feeling that they had
some tragic relation to his life and character--perhaps to his
destiny--although I no longer entertained the notion that they were
the vagaries of a disordered mind. Whatever might be thought of his
views, his exposition of them was too logical for that. Over and
over, his last words came back to me: "Consciousness is the creature