“Europe was terribly far off in those days, and Alice knew at once what I meant.  She didn’t take it in the least as I’d expected—­it would have been easier if she had.  She held her book very tight, and turned away a moment to wind up the lamp on my desk—­it had a ground glass shade with vine leaves, and glass drops around the edge, I remember.  Then she came back, held out her hand, and said:  ‘Good-bye.’  And as she said it she looked straight at me and kissed me.  I had never felt anything as fresh and shy and brave as her kiss.  It was worse than any reproach, and it made me ashamed to deserve a reproach from her.  I said to myself:  ’I’ll marry her, and when my aunt dies she’ll leave us this house, and I’ll sit here at the desk and go on with my book; and Alice will sit over there with her embroidery and look at me as she’s looking now.  And life will go on like that for any number of years.’  The prospect frightened me a little, but at the time it didn’t frighten me as much as doing anything to hurt her; and ten minutes later she had my seal ring on my finger, and my promise that when I went abroad she should go with me.

“You’ll wonder why I’m enlarging on this familiar incident.  It’s because the evening on which it took place was the very evening on which I first saw the queer sight I’ve spoken of.  Being at that time an ardent believer in a necessary sequence between cause and effect I naturally tried to trace some kind of link between what had just happened to me in my aunt’s library, and what was to happen a few hours later on the same night; and so the coincidence between the two events always remained in my mind.

“I went up to bed with rather a heavy heart, for I was bowed under the weight of the first good action I had ever consciously committed; and young as I was, I saw the gravity of my situation.  Don’t imagine from this that I had hitherto been an instrument of destruction.  I had been merely a harmless young man, who had followed his bent and declined all collaboration with Providence.  Now I had suddenly undertaken to promote the moral order of the world, and I felt a good deal like the trustful spectator who has given his gold watch to the conjurer, and doesn’t know in what shape he’ll get it back when the trick is over ...  Still, a glow of self-righteousness tempered my fears, and I said to myself as I undressed that when I’d got used to being good it probably wouldn’t make me as nervous as it did at the start.  And by the time I was in bed, and had blown out my candle, I felt that I really was getting used to it, and that, as far as I’d got, it was not unlike sinking down into one of my aunt’s very softest wool mattresses.

“I closed my eyes on this image, and when I opened them it must have been a good deal later, for my room had grown cold, and the night was intensely still.  I was waked suddenly by the feeling we all know—­the feeling that there was something near me that hadn’t been there when I fell asleep.  I sat up and strained my eyes into the darkness.  The room was pitch black, and at first I saw nothing; but gradually a vague glimmer at the foot of the bed turned into two eyes staring back at me.  I couldn’t see the face attached to them—­on account of the darkness, I imagined—­but as I looked the eyes grew more and more distinct:  they gave out a light of their own.