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 thoughts, there rose again the idea that the inhabitants were waiting for him to declare himself, to take an attitude, to do this, or to do that; and that when he had done so they in their turn would at length make some direct response, accepting or rejecting him.  Yet the vital matter concerning which his decision was awaited came no nearer to him.

Once or twice he purposely followed little processions or groups of the citizens in order to find out, if possible, on what purpose they were bent; but they always discovered him in time and dwindled away, each individual going his or her own way.  It was always the same:  he never could learn what their main interest was.  The cathedral was ever empty, the old church of St. Martin, at the other end of the town, deserted.  They shopped because they had to, and not because they wished to.  The booths stood neglected, the stalls unvisited, the little cafes desolate.  Yet the streets were always full, the townsfolk ever on the bustle.

“Can it be,” he thought to himself, yet with a deprecating laugh that he should have dared to think anything so odd, “can it be that these people are people of the twilight, that they live only at night their real life, and come out honestly only with the dusk?  That during the day they make a sham though brave pretence, and after the sun is down their true life begins?  Have they the souls of night-things, and is the whole blessed town in the hands of the cats?”

The fancy somehow electrified him with little shocks of shrinking and dismay.  Yet, though he affected to laugh, he knew that he was beginning to feel more than uneasy, and that strange forces were tugging with a thousand invisible cords at the very centre of his being.  Something utterly remote from his ordinary life, something that had not waked for years, began faintly to stir in his soul, sending feelers abroad into his brain and heart, shaping queer thoughts and penetrating even into certain of his minor actions.  Something exceedingly vital to himself, to his soul, hung in the balance.