obviously, yet something that he both liked and hated telling.

"I went back to the inn," he continued presently in a louder voice, "and
dined. I felt a new strange world about me. My old world of reality
receded. Here, whether I liked it or no, was something new and
incomprehensible. I regretted having left the train so impulsively. An
adventure was upon me, and I loathed adventures as foreign to my nature.
Moreover, this was the beginning apparently of an adventure somewhere
deep within me, in a region I could not check or measure, and a feeling
of alarm mingled itself with my wonder--alarm for the stability of what
I had for forty years recognised as my 'personality.'

"I went upstairs to bed, my mind teeming with thoughts that were unusual
to me, and of rather a haunting description. By way of relief I kept
thinking of that nice, prosaic noisy train and all those wholesome,
blustering passengers. I almost wished I were with them again. But my
dreams took me elsewhere. I dreamed of cats, and soft-moving creatures,
and the silence of life in a dim muffled world beyond the senses."

II

Vezin stayed on from day to day, indefinitely, much longer than he had
intended. He felt in a kind of dazed, somnolent condition. He did
nothing in particular, but the place fascinated him and he could not
decide to leave. Decisions were always very difficult for him and he
sometimes wondered how he had ever brought himself to the point of
leaving the train. It seemed as though some one else must have arranged
it for him, and once or twice his thoughts ran to the swarthy Frenchman
who had sat opposite. If only he could have understood that long
sentence ending so strangely with "_a cause du sommeil et a cause des
chats_." He wondered what it all meant.

Meanwhile the hushed softness of the town held him prisoner and he
sought in his muddling, gentle way to find out where the mystery lay,
and what it was all about. But his limited French and his constitutional
hatred of active investigation made it hard for him to buttonhole
anybody and ask questions. He was content to observe, and watch, and
remain negative.

The weather held on calm and hazy, and this just suited him. He wandered
about the town till he knew every street and alley. The people suffered
him to come and go without let or hindrance, though it became clearer to
him every day that he was never free himself from observation. The town
watched him as a cat watches a mo