the struggle must have reached their ears and set on edge their

curiosity; and now, in all the neighbouring houses, he divined them

sitting motionless and with uplifted ear--solitary people, condemned to

spend Christmas dwelling alone on memories of the past, and now

startingly recalled from that tender exercise; happy family parties

struck into silence round the table, the mother still with raised finger:

every degree and age and humour, but all, by their own hearths, prying

and hearkening and weaving the rope that was to hang him. Sometimes it

seemed to him he could not move too softly; the clink of the tall

Bohemian goblets rang out loudly like a bell; and alarmed by the bigness

of the ticking, he was tempted to stop the clocks. And then, again, with

a swift transition of his terrors, the very silence of the place appeared

a source of peril, and a thing to strike and freeze the passer-by; and he

would step more boldly, and bustle aloud among the contents of the shop,

and imitate, with elaborate bravado, the movements of a busy man at ease

in his own house.

But he was now so pulled about by different alarms that, while one

portion of his mind was still alert and cunning, another trembled on the

brink of lunacy. One hallucination in particular took a strong hold on

his credulity. The neighbour hearkening with white face beside his

window, the passer-by arrested by a horrible surmise on the

pavement--these could at worst suspect, they could not know; through the

brick walls and shuttered windows only sounds could penetrate. But here,

within the house, was he alone? He knew he was; he had watched the

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