It was with these considerations that his present attention was charged--they perfectly availed to make what he saw portentous. He _couldn't_, by any lapse, have blocked that aperture; and if he hadn't, if it was unthinkable, why what else was clear but that there had been another agent? Another agent?--he had been catching, as he felt, a moment back, the very breath of him; but when had he been so close as in this simple, this logical, this completely personal act? It was so logical, that is, that one might have _taken_ it for personal; yet for what did Brydon take it, he asked himself, while, softly panting, he felt his eyes almost leave their sockets. Ah this time at last they _were_, the two, the opposed projections of him, in presence; and this time, as much as one would, the question of danger loomed. With it rose, as not before, the question of courage--for what he knew the blank face of the door to say to him was "Show us how much you have!" It stared, it glared back at him with that challenge; it put to him the two alternatives: should he just push it open or not? Oh to have this consciousness was to _think_--and to think, Brydon knew, as he stood there, was, with the lapsing moments, not to have acted! Not to have acted--that was the misery and the pang--was even still not to act; was in fact _all_ to feel the thing in another, in a new and terrible way. How long did he pause and how long did he debate? There was presently nothing to measure it; for his vibration had already changed--as just by the effect of its intensity. Shut up there, at bay, defiant, and with the prodigy of the thing palpably proveably _done_, thus giving notice like some stark signboard--under that accession of accent the situation itself had turned; and Brydon at last remarkably made up his mind on what it had turned to.