If as he paced he sought to avoid suspicion, of what was it at bottom that he was to have been suspected? He would have confessed, had the question been put to him, that it was only of his thoughts, which he was himself moreover the only person to know anything about. If he desired so extremely to hide them was it then that his conscience was bad about them? An examination of the state of his conscience would perhaps in truth have shown him as entertaining a hope scarce seriously to be confessed. If he had an underhand dream that his house might prove "haunted"--the result of an inordinate conception, in his previous time, of old and doubtless foolish tales--the thing might after all have been forgiven to his so belated freedom. Experience had lagged with him behind interpretation, and the worst that could have been said was that his gift for the latter might do well to pause awhile till an increase of the former could catch up. By the time it did catch up he might perhaps have come to make out for himself that, as is perfectly known to biases millions, despair seldom fails to settle on any surmise that the common forces of solicitation in respectable neighbourhoods may be in a given case much transcended. He was sufficiently a man of the world, further, not to care to face the smile that would greet his having had that lesson to learn. He had disembarked with an immense provision of prepared sensibility, but had packed into its interstices various fine precautions against his passing for a fool. He was slightly ashamed, if the truth be told, of the bounds he had honestly to set to his reach of reminiscence, and he understood that he should most please himself by making his pretensions few. It would be simple enough, he seemed to see, to betray on occasion his ignorance, but he might find it in general awkward to betray some sides of his knowledge. He knew too much for a man who had seen so little, and nothing could be more fatuous than to go about apologising. Of course he exaggerated the danger of the perception of either excess in so preoccupied a world. He was at any rate careful to keep to himself his real reason for disgustedly flushing in hours of privacy at the thought of the figure his acquisition would make at the hands, or at least under the pen, of auctioneers and agents eager to invite him to regard it as a source of income. The reason was simply that the language of advertisement, the inimitable catchpenny flourish, depressed him by the perfection of its missing of the whole point. The whole point, that of the exceptional eligibility they panted to express in their terms, was the ineffable genius itself of the place, which while he kept indirectly raking it, grew upon him day by day. He couldn't go so far as to tell anyone that he had never seen anything so old--so old at once and so elaborate--as a structure dating only from the earlier years of the previous century. He couldn't decently cry it