the door, and looked out with an odd sort of expectation, and a rather
agreeable disappointment, upon vacancy.




CHAPTER XII.

IN WHICH UNCLE LORNE TROUBLES ME.


I was growing most uncomfortably like one of Mrs. Anne Radcliffe's
heroes--a nervous race of demigods.

I walked like a sentinel up and down my chamber, puffing leisurely the
solemn incense, and trying to think of the Opera and my essay on
'Paradise Lost,' and other pleasant subjects. But it would not do. Every
now and then, as I turned towards the door, I fancied I saw it softly
close. I can't the least say whether it was altogether fancy. It was with
the corner, or as the Italians have it, the 'tail' of my eye that I saw,
or imagined that I saw, this trifling but unpleasant movement.

I called out once or twice sharply--'Come in!' 'Who's there?' 'Who's
that?' and so forth, without any sort of effect, except that unpleasant
reaction upon the nerves which follows the sound of one's own voice in a
solitude of this kind.

The fact is I did not myself believe in that stealthy motion of my door,
and set it down to one of those illusions which I have sometimes
succeeded in analysing--a half-seen combination of objects which, rightly