When the great building loomed up before him in the dark, his mind recalled instantly the night he had entered it before, attracted by the light in the window. There was no light about it now but that shut in the lantern he carried. The immensity and dead stillness would have been a trying thing for many a man to encounter, but as he relocked the door and made his way to his den, he thought of them only from one point of view.
"It is the silence of the grave," he said. "A man can concentrate himself upon his work as if there was not a human breath stirring within a mile of him."
Somehow, even his room wore a look which seemed to belong to the silence of night—a look he felt he had not seen before. He marked it with a vague sense of mystery when he set his lantern down upon the table, turning the light upon the spot on which his work would stand.
Then he took down the case and opened it and removed the model.
"It will not be forgotten again," he thought aloud. "If it is to be finished, it will be finished here."
Half the night passed before he returned home. When he did so he went to his room and slept heavily until daylight. He had never slept as he slept in these nights,—heavy dreamless sleep, from which, at first, he used to awaken with a start and a perfectly blank sense of loss and dread, but which became, at last, unbroken.
Night after night found him at his labor. It grew upon him; he longed for it through the day; he could not have broken from it if he would.
Once, as he sat at his table, he fancied that he heard a lock click and afterward a stealthy footstep. It was a
