occurred to him. She was too remote, too far beyond even the wildest flights of his rarely erratic imagination.
And presently, shivering, he began to undress. With the routine of this daily act, he began at once to grow more calm and more assured. One by one, as he took each article from his pocket—a pen, a pencil, a pocketknife, the watch Uncle Henry had given him on his twenty-first birthday for never having touched tobacco, a few coins—the disturbing sensations seemed to loose their subtle hold. As he laid these things in turn on the mantelpiece beneath the chromo of Watts' Hope, it seemed that he deposited with each of them a fear, an uneasiness, a premonition; the breath-taking sense of grand adventure oozed out of his finger tips.
At length he hung his coat and waistcoat over the back of the chair, placed his shoes beneath the bed and his trousers, carefully folded (to preserve the neat creases that meant so much in the world of himself and Mr. Bruce) beneath the mattress. In the flickering gaslight his body looked pinched and cold, as if he suffered from a lack of warm blood. He was a muscular little man, but his muscles were hard and tight and knotty, the muscles of a man whose only exercise was taken each morning beside the bath tub.
At last after turning out the flickering gas flame, he slipped, shivering and gasping, into his nightshirt and sprang courageously into the monumental bed. Seldom used, it was like the room, dampish and chilly, but before long the warmth of his body permeated the cotton sheets and, coupled with the sound of the wild storm outside, it filled him with a certain comfort which lulled him presently to sleep. In the air-tight room he slept with his mouth opened a little, his teeth exposed, so that in breathing he made a faint wheezing noise.
