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.

And, always when he returned to the inn about the hour of sunset, he saw
the figures of the townsfolk stealing through the d