look, and when he raised them again she was no longer there; she had disappeared, swallowed up in the darkness of her silent house.
*****
The glass eyes of the stags' and deer's heads upon the walls looked down at him with mingled sadness and derision. And in that moment of suspense, alone in the big melancholy room, he realized the whole immensity of his wretchedness and his humiliation. He felt himself a thief, and worse than a thief, a guest who takes advantage of the solitude of the house that shelters him to rob it basely. He averted his eyes, for he could not meet even the glassy stare of the heads upon the wall: but he did not waver in his purpose for one moment, and even if the death-cry of the woman had suddenly filled the house with horror, he would not have repented having rejected her.
He waited a few minutes longer, but nobody appeared. He had a confused idea that he was standing in the middle of a dead world of all his dreams and his mistakes, waiting till some
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