exceedingly. It may have been all perfectly natural, he knew, yet he
could not make it out how the alleys swallowed them up and shot them
forth in a second of time when there were no visible doorways or
openings near enough to explain the phenomenon. Once he followed two
elderly women who, he felt, had been particularly examining him from
across the street--quite near the inn this was--and saw them turn the
corner a few feet only in front of him. Yet when he sharply followed on
their heels he saw nothing but an utterly deserted alley stretching in
front of him with no sign of a living thing. And the only opening
through which they could have escaped was a porch some fifty yards away,
which not the swiftest human runner could have reached in time.

And in just such sudden fashion people appeared, when he never expected
them. Once when he heard a great noise of fighting going on behind a low
wall, and hurried up to see what was going on, what should he see but a
group of girls and women engaged in vociferous conversation which
instantly hushed itself to the normal whispering note of the town when
his head appeared over the wall. And even then none of them turned to
look at him directly, but slunk off with the most unaccountable
rapidity into doors and sheds across the yard. And their voices, he
thought, had sounded so like, so strangely like, the angry snarling of
fighting animals, almost of cats.

The whole spirit of the town, however, continued to evade him as
something elusive, protean, screened from the outer world, and at the
same time intensely, genuinely vital; and, since he now formed part of
its life, this concealment puzzled and irritated him; more--it began
rather to frighten him.

Out of the mists that slowly gathered about his ordinary surface