He watched this stir with a brave assumption that he had
been surveying it all his life, but a horrible tight pain in the bottom
of his throat told him that he was a bravado, almost a liar.
He found himself, now that the "twenty-third" was gaping right there in
front of him, with its fiery throat wide and flaming, doing the
strangest thing. He was frightened of the dusk, he would run through the
passage and up the stairs at breathless speed, he would look for a
moment at the lamp-lit square with the lights of the opposite houses
tigers' eyes, and the trees filmy like smoke, then would hastily draw
the curtains and greet the warm inhabited room with a little gasp of
reassurance. Strangest of all, he found himself often in the old nursery
at the top of the house. Very seldom did any one come there now, and it
had the pathos of a room grown cold and comfortless. Most of the toys
were put away or given to hospitals, but the rocking-horse with his
Christmas-tree tail was there, and the doll's-house, and a railway with
trains and stations.
He was here. He was saying to himself: "Yes, it was just over there, by
the window, that He came that time.
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