r,
and only turned suddenly at the last moment, and was there beside him.

Vezin smiled curiously to himself as he described how he began to
realize these things. Other tourists there were none in the hostel, but
he recalled the figures of one or two old men, inhabitants, who took
their _dejeuner_ and dinner there, and remembered how fantastically they
entered the room in similar fashion. First, they paused in the doorway,
peering about the room, and then, after a temporary inspection, they
came in, as it were, sideways, keeping close to the walls so that he
wondered which table they were making for, and at the last minute making
almost a little quick run to their particular seats. And again he
thought of the ways and methods of cats.

Other small incidents, too, impressed him as all part of this queer,
soft town with its muffled, indirect life, for the way some of the
people appeared and disappeared with extraordinary swiftness puzzled him
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,