With such thoughts, or dreams (for they were hardly sincerely enough entertained to be called thoughts), Redclyffe spent the day; a strange, delicious day, in spite of the sombre shadows that enveloped it. He fancied himself strangely wonted, already, to the house; as if his every part and peculiarity had at once fitted into its nooks, and corners, and crannies; but, indeed, his mobile nature and active fancy were not entirely to be trusted in this matter; it was, perhaps, his American faculty of making himself at home anywhere, that he mistook for the feeling of being peculiarly at home here. CHAPTER XXIII. Redclyffe was now established in the great house which had been so long and so singularly an object of interest with him. With his customary impressibility by the influences around him, he begun to take in the circumstances, and to understand them by more subtile tokens than he could well explain to himself. There was the steward, [Endnote: 1] or whatever was his precise office; so quiet, so subdued, so nervous, so strange! What had been this man’s history? What was now the secret of his daily life? There he was, creeping stealthily up and down the staircases, and about the passages of the house; always as if he were afraid of meeting somebody. On seeing Redclyffe in the house, the latter fancied that the man expressed a kind of interest in his face; but whether pleasure or pain he could not well tell; only he sometimes found that he was contemplating him from a distance, or from the obscurity of the room in which he sat,--or from a corridor, while he smoked his cigar on the lawn. A great part, if not the whole of this, he imputed to his knowledge of Redclyffe’s connections with the Doctor; but yet this hardly seemed sufficient to account for the pertinacity with which the old man haunted his footsteps,--the poor, nervous old thing,--always near him, or often unexpectedly so; and yet apparently not very willing to hold conversation with him, having nothing of importance to say. “Mr. Omskirk,” said Redclyffe to him, a day or two after the commencement of his visit, “how many years have you now been in this situation?” “0, sir, ever since the Doctor’s departure for America,” said Omskirk, “now thirty and five years, five months, and three days.” “A long time,” said Redclyffe, smiling, “and you seem to keep the account of it very accurately.” “A very long time, your honor,” said Omskirk; “so long, that I seem to have lived one life before it began, and I cannot think of any life than just what I had. My life was broken off short in the midst; and what belonged to the earlier part of it was another man’s life; this is mine.”