This act employed him, thanks to the bunchy wick, a minute or two; but no sooner was the little flame assured and he had raised aloft the glimmering torch than he was filled with the sense of a quite new relation to the house. It was but a trifle, yet he had not hitherto so much used the place even as to light a candle. This triviality made all the difference of raising him from the condition, comparatively poor, of a visitor who betrayed timidity. It registered in a single brief insistence the fact that he was master, and when he now almost waved in the air his light, of which the wax hadn't time to melt, it was in sign--tremble though his hand still might--of a confidence sharply gained. The impression was strong with him of having traversed a crisis--served, and all in half an hour, one of those concentrated terms of pious self-dedication or whatever by which the aspirants of the ages of faith used to earn their knighthood. What was it he had emerged from after this fashion of the accepted probationer? He had had his idea of testing the house, and lo it was the house that by a turn of the tables had tested him. He had at all events grasped his candle as if it had been sword or cross, and his attitude may pass for us as sufficiently his answer or his vow. It had already occurred to him that, so completely consecrated, he must make one more round. He moved to the end of the room and then moved back; it had begun to give him extraordinary pleasure thus to march with his light. He marched out to the lobby and the staircase and then down, slow and solemn, to the hall he had supposed Jacobean and in which, illumined, he could once more, by the mere play of his arm, make due amends for his mistake. He came up again to the landing by the great room and, after a slight hesitation, continued his ascent. He revolved through the chambers above and amused himself, at successive windows, with the thought of the observation possibly incurred, out in the square, by such a wandering twinkle from floor to floor and in the small hours on the part of some soaked and sleepy policeman not already, in respect to the old house, without a working hypothesis. On his return to the level of the drawing rooms he had another of his pauses; he stood with his candle aloft and his eyes attached a minute to the door that, open at the end of the passage, would have admitted him straight to the panelled parlour.