This, too, was as a reminiscence.
I rose and lifted a corner of the blind.

Over the black belt of the garden I saw the long line of Queen Street, with here and there a lighted window.

How often before had my nurse lifted me out of bed and pointed them out to me, while we wondered together if, there also, there were children that could not sleep, and if these lighted oblongs were signs of those that waited like us for the morning.
I went out into the lobby, and looked down into the great deep well of the staircase.

For what cause I know not, just as it used to be in the old days that the feverish child might be the better served, a peep of gas illuminated a narrow circle far below me.

But where I was, all was darkness and silence, save the dry monotonous ticking of the clock that came ceaselessly up to my ear.
The final crown of it all, however, the last touch of reproduction on the pictures of my memory, was the arrival of that time for which, all night through, I waited and longed of old.