...of prey

Now he advanced as quietly as possible so that he might detect every sound. Blind man's buff, blind man's buff...in a country-house on a winter's night, long, long ago. He stumbled against something hard and felt it with one hand, never for a moment letting loose the line which he held taut across the room. It was a suitcase. He thrust it away with his knee and moved on, driving the invisible prey before him into an imaginary corner. Her silence irritated him at first; but now he could detect her quite plainly. It was not her breathing, not the beating of her heart, but a sort of general impression: the voice of her life itself, which, in another moment, he would destroy. And then - peace, serenity, light.

[Laughter in the Dark, Nabokov, V.]