he was walking very slow at one end to have the rapture of walking
fast at the other. Neither suggestion seemed to make much sense.
His brain was growing darker and darker, like his room.

Yet, as he began to think steadily, the very blackness of his
cell seemed to make his thoughts more vivid; he began to see as in
a kind of vision the fantastic feet capering along the corridor in
unnatural or symbolic attitudes. Was it a heathen religious dance?
Or some entirely new kind of scientific exercise? Father Brown
began to ask himself with more exactness what the steps suggested.
Taking the slow step first: it certainly was not the step of the
proprietor. Men of his type walk with a rapid waddle, or they sit
still. It could not be any servant or messenger waiting for
directions. It did not sound like it. The poorer orders (in an
oligarchy) sometimes lurch about when they are slightly drunk, but
generally, and especially in such gorgeous scenes, they stand or
sit in constrained attitudes. No; that heavy yet springy step,
with a kind of careless emphasis, not specially noisy, yet not
caring what noise it made, belonged to only one of the animals of
this earth. It was a gentleman of western Europe, and probably
one who had never worked for his living.

Just as he came to this solid certainty, the step changed to
the quicker one, and ran past the door as feverishly as a rat.
The listener remarked that though this step was much swifter it
was also much more noiseless, almost as if the man were walking on
tiptoe. Yet it was not associated in his mind with secrecy, but
with something else--something that he could not remember. He
was maddened by one of those half-memories that make a man feel
half-witted. Surely he had heard that strange, swift walking