say so"--he made a deprecating gesture--"or less prepared by what had
gone before, would never have noticed it at all. She was always still,
always reposeful, yet she seemed to be everywhere at once, so that I
never could escape from her. I was continually meeting the stare and
laughter of her great eyes, in the corners of the rooms, in the
passages, calmly looking at me through the windows, or in the busiest
parts of the public streets."

Their intimacy, it seems, grew very rapidly after this first encounter
which had so violently disturbed the little man's equilibrium. He was
naturally very prim, and prim folk live mostly in so small a world that
anything violently unusual may shake them clean out of it, and they
therefore instinctively distrust originality. But Vezin began to forget
his primness after awhile. The girl was always modestly behaved, and as
her mother's representative she naturally had to do with the guests in
the hotel. It was not out of the way that a spirit of camaraderie should
spring up. Besides, she was young, she was charmingly pretty, she was
French, and--she obviously liked him.

At the same time, there was something indescribable--a certain
indefinable atmosphere of other places, other times--that made him try
hard to remain on his guard, and sometimes made him catch his breath
with a sudden start. It was all rather like a delirious dream, half
delight, half dread, he confided in a whisper to Dr. Silence; and more
than once he hardly knew quite what he was doing or saying, as though he
were driven forward by impulses he scarcely recognised as his own.

And though the thought of leaving presented itself again and again to
his mind, it was each time with less insistence, so that he stayed on
from day to day, becoming more and more a part of the sleepy life of