, as though listening for some faint echo
from the direction in which Vjera had disappeared, then he slowly and
thoughtfully walked away. He had forgotten to eat at dinner-time, and now
he forgot that the hour of the second meal had come round. He walked on,
not knowing and not caring whither he went, absorbed in the contemplation
of the bright pictures which framed themselves in his brain, troubled only
by his ever-recurring wonder at Vjera's behaviour.

Unconsciously, and from sheer force of habit, he threaded the streets in
the direction of the tobacconist's shop where so much of his time was
spent. If it be not true that the ghosts of the dead haunt places familiar
to them in life, yet the superstition is founded upon the instincts of
human nature. Men begin to haunt certain spots unconsciously while they
are alive, especially those which they are obliged to visit every day and
in which they are accustomed to sit, idle or at work, during the greater
part of the week. The artist, when he wishes to be completely at rest,
re-enters the studio he left but an hour earlier; the sailor hangs about
the port when he is ashore, the shopman cannot resist the temptation to
spend an hour among his wares on Sunday, the farmer is irresistibly drawn
to the field to while away the time on holidays between dinner and supper.
We all of us see more and understand better what we see, in those
surroundings most familiar to us, and it is a general law that the average
intelligence likes the best that which it understands with the least
effort. The mechanical part of us, too, when free from any direct and
especial impulse of the mind, does unknowingly what it has been in the
habit of doing. Two-thirds of all the physical diseases in the world are
caused by the disturbance of the mental habits and are vastly aggravated
by the direction of the thoughts to the part afflicted. Idiots and madmen
are often phenomenally healthy people, because there is in their case no
unnatural effort of the mind to control and manage the body. The Count
having bestowed no thought upon the direction of his walk, mechanically
turned towards the scene of his daily labour.

Considering that he believed himself to have abandoned for ever the
irksome employment of rolling tobacco in a piece of parchment in order to
slip it into a piece of paper, it might have been supposed that he would
be glad to look at anything rather than the glass door of the shop in
which he ha