THE SENSE OF THE PAST
less, who, declining at the outset a fire, seemed to like the gruesome chill, and who now let the shadows multiply without so much as ringing for a light.
The windy lanterns flickered in the square and were reflected in the wet, and as he turned about for another prowl—his last decidedly this one—he assured himself that he had in his pocket matches for tobacco and that, should he require them, the numerous brave stiff candle-sticks of silver and brass (oh what people he knew, even Aurora herself, would have given for them!) were furnished with tall tapers. On his reaching again for his final round the first drawing-room, which occupied with its fine windows the width of the house and into which, as the curtains were still undrawn, the street-lamp before the outer door played up with a gusty rise and fall that made objects, chairs, cabinets, sofas, pictures, look the least bit equivocal and like some vague human company that blinked or grimaced at him—on his thus finding himself once more where he seemed most to hold the key of the place he resumed the pointless pacing that had occupied so much of his visit. He walked from end to end as with a problem to think out; listened to his tread on the carpetless floor, for the perfect polish of which (no material note in the whole scale being more to his taste) he had made from the first a point of commending the housekeeper;
80
