“Squalor!” she exclaimed, with a fine disdain. “You would have had no need for squalor, you beautiful boy! All women must have loved you.”
“Boy?” He laughed. “Good Lord! I was never a boy! I was born with a grown-up soul. Yes, they were kind; but I wanted none of their kindness. All women were to me mere shadows. Love never called to me.”
“The vice?” she said. “What was it?”
“A mental thing. A morbid craving to look on at other people’s joys; to view them, without sharing them; an absolute hunger to see home life, though I had none of my own. This led me into the low-down practice of prowling about after dark, peering in at lighted windows, like a lonely soul from another world, spying on bliss he might not share. I began it as quite a little chap, peeping and running away. The passion grew as I grew. When my day’s work was over, I would walk miles to stalk unshuttered windows. Many a time I have narrowly escaped being run in as a probable burglar. Many a fright I have given to innocent people who looked up suddenly and surprised my uncanny face pressed against the glass. I know now what I was seeking. In some sub-conscious part of me I knew that somewhere in the world was a window through which I should look and see at last a room which would be HOME.
“So I prowled on. I was prowling to-night. But I never before wanted to be invited to enter. I preferred to be outside. And—until to-night—I never realised what a low-down habit it was. To my morbid emptiness it seemed no wrong toward happy people, that I should just look upon their joys.”
“But why—to-night?”
“Ah, because all is different. You have done something to me; I don’t know what, or why. Something in your sub-consciousness must have reached mine. You have burst the bars of my prison and set my spirit free. I shall leave here and go back to the world, a man among men. Hitherto I have felt—do you know the weird Schubert song?—a Doppelgänger. Good Lord, the horror of it! But you have broken the spell. I don’t know how you did it. Perhaps it was because you asked me in.”
“Why did you come in?” she whispered: “You, who always preferred to remain outside.”
“Dare I tell you?” he asked. “Will you think it awful cheek? It was because—at last—at last—it was Home.”
The woman on the couch opened wide her arms and leaned toward him with a movement of extraordinary tenderness. Her face was illumined by a radiance almost unearthly in its sublime joy.