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.