e. Still his hungry ears fed on nothing but sinister echoes,
the barren husks of his own clamour. There was no curt voice of a man,
no quick, questioning tread of a woman. There were dead white ashes on
the hearth, and the silence was grimly kept by the dumb household gods.

His nervousness increased. So vividly did his memory people the streets
and shops and houses that the air was vibrant with sound,--low-toned
conversations, shouts, calls, laughter, the voices of children, the
creaking of wagons, pounding hammers, the clangour of many works; yet
all muffled away from him, as if coming from some phantom-land. His
eyes, too, were kept darting from side to side by vague forms that
flitted privily near by, around corners, behind him, lurking always a
little beyond his eyes, turn them quickly as he would. Now, facing the
street, he shouted, again and again, from sheer nervousness; but the
echoes came back alone.

He recalled a favourite day-dream of boyhood,--a dream in which he
became the sole person in the world, wandering with royal liberty
through strange cities, with no voice to chide or forbid, free to choose
and partake, as would a prince, of all the wonders and delights that
boyhood can picture; his own master and the master of all the marvels
and treasures of earth. This was like the dream come true; but it
distressed him. It was necessary to find the people at once. He had a
feeling that his instant duty was to break some malign spell that lay
upon the place--or upon himself. For one of them was surely bewitched.

Out he strode to the middle of the street, between two rows of yellowing
maples, and there he shouted again and still more loudly to evoke some
shape or sound of life, sending a full, high, ringing call up the empty
thoroughfare. Between the shouts he scanned the near-by houses intently.

At last, half-way up the next block, even as his lungs filled for
another peal, he thought his eyes caught for a short half-second the
mere thin shadow of a skulking figure. It had seemed to pass through a
grape arbour that all but shielded from the street a house slightly more
pretentious than its neighbours. He ran toward the spot, calling as he
went. But when he had vaulted over the low fence, run across the garden
and around the end of the arbour, dense with the green leaves and
clusters of purple grapes, the space in front of the house was bare. If
more than a trick-phantom of his eye had been there, it had van