This evening at any rate, while the day darkened and the weather shrouded his vigil, he invoked convenient illusions with a tremour he had not yet felt; he arrived, between his fondness and his fear, at the easiest compromise with concentration. Unmistakeably, as the afternoon waned, he held off as much as he hovered. It was a natural effect of his restlessness that he didn't for the present see himself settled. It was positively as if, with the cup so held to his lips, the taste of 1710 might prove too stiff a dose. He would judge, as it were, when he came back--back, as who should say also, from everywhere else. He would go of course everywhere else; intellectually now he could so well afford to. This would make all the general initiation that, as a preliminary, was indispensable--the series of scattered dashes and superficial dips. Strange his divination, or whatever one might call it, that from such a plunge at Number Nine as would thoroughly penetrate he might possibly not emerge undamaged--or even, it was actually to be figured, not emerge at all. He might remain there below, remain in the quintessential depth that stood so ready for a real resident. He pulled up his patrol as it again came to him that for this privilege of real residence he had a candidate in hand. He loitered anew, looked and listened, strolled and stopped, paused at moments, with hands in pockets, to gaze all too gravely at a mere panel in a wainscot, a mere seam in a curtain, and repeat over vaguely the name of Mrs. Midmore of Drydown. She had gradually become for him less abstract, and he reflected with interest that she was the one historic figure he was as yet in position to introduce into the view. There were in fact moments of desultory thought when he felt as if she were already in it by her own act--so close a relation to it seemed asserted by her proved resolution. This proved resolution was, so far as his wondering mind could now place her before him, what was most the mark of her aspect, and there were literally for him flights of fancy through which, as she stood there, she looked out at him with a hard old face. Yes, she would be old, Mrs. Midmore of Drydown--in the sense at least that she wouldn't be new: she wouldn't without that have what he could only phrase as the connection; and she would not less assuredly be hard: she wouldn't without that have what he could only think of as the nerve. He dressed her, with unwitting confusion, in the old manner of the house--the manner of the two or three portraits of women (these, alas, plainly enough, not from illustrious or even from known hands) inserted in the woodwork of the reception rooms, he heard for an instant, hallucinated, the scrape of her stiff petticoat on the floor, and the tap of her shoes, if it weren't rather the click of her small crutch, on the stone stair. She wore a little black hood fastened under her chin by an ornament--_that_