By getting on the floor he found a peephole just above the level of the grass through which he could see without detection. This must be his spying place. Unlikely as it was that anyone would track him to this lair, he must be carefully on the lookout. What he should do if threatened with a visitor was not very clear to him. There being no exit except by the door, and the door being toward the road from which a visitor would naturally approach, there was no escape on that side. Escape being out of the question, there would only remain—the other thing. The other thing was always the great possibility. He hadn’t abandoned the thought of it; he had only postponed the necessity. He would live as long as he could; and yet the necessity of the other thing would probably arise. If it arose, he hoped he should get through it by that tendency which he recognized in himself as clearly as Mr. Bickley had read it from his profile—to act before he thought. With this as a possibility, he got down to his peephole, put the pistol near him on the floor, and began on his doughnuts. For breakfast, he allowed himself three, keeping the rest for his midday needs. When darkness fell he would steal out and buy more. He could do this as long as his money held out, and before it was spent something would probably have happened. What that something would be he did not forecast. He was in a fix where forecasting wasn’t possible. The minute was the only thing, and a thing that had grown precious. Even the family had somehow become subordinate to that. In the strangeness of his night, he seemed to have traveled away from them. A man clinging to a spar on the ocean might have had this sense of remoteness from his dear ones safe on shore. Since they were safe on shore, that would be the main thing. Since his mother and sisters could come and go in Indiana Avenue, he could wish them nothing more. That was the all-essential, and they had it. Want, anxiety, grief, "and no Teddy coming home in the evenings," were trifles as compared with this priceless blessing of security. So he settled down amid filth and slime and the debris of charred wood to watch and wait and cling to his life till he could cling to it no longer.