A great mouser on the watch occurred to him.

She took him in with a single comprehensive

glance that was polite without being cordial. Her neck, he noticed, was

extraordinarily supple in spite of its proportions, for it turned so

easily to follow him, and the head it carried bowed so very flexibly.

“But when she looked at me, you know,” said Vezin,

with that little apologetic smile in his brown eyes, and that faintly

deprecating gesture of the shoulders that was characteristic of him,

“the odd notion came to me that really she had intended to make quite a

different movement, and that with a single bound she could have leaped

at me across the width of that stone yard and pounced upon me like some

huge cat upon a mouse.”

He laughed a little soft laugh, and Dr. Silence made

a note in his book without interrupting, while Vezin proceeded in a

tone as though he feared he had already told too much and more than we

could believe.

“Very soft, yet very active she was, for all her size and mass, and

I felt she knew what I was doing even after I had passed and was behind

her back. She spoke to me, and her voice was smooth and running. She

asked if I had my luggage, and was comfortable in my room, and then

added that dinner was at seven o’clock, and that they were very early

people in this little country town. Clearly, she intended to convey

that late hours were not encouraged.”

Evidently, she contrived by voice and manner to give

him the impression that here he would be “managed,” that everything

would be arranged and planned for him, and that he had nothing to do

but fall into the groove and obey. No decided action or sharp personal

effort would be looked for from him. It was the very reverse of the

train. He walked quietly out into the street feeling soothed and

peaceful. He realised that he was in a milieu that suited him

and stroked him the right way. It was so much easier to be obedient. He

began to purr again, and to feel that all the town purred with him.

About the streets of that little town he meandered

gently, falling deeper and deeper into the spirit of repose that

characterised it. With no special aim he wandered up and down, and to

and fro. The September sunshine fell slantingly over the roofs. Down

winding alleyways, fringed with tumbling gables and open casements, he

caught fairylike glimpses of the great plain below, and of the meadows

and yellow copses lying like a dream-map in the haze. The spell of the

past held very potently here, he felt.

The streets were full of picturesquely garbed men

and women, all busy enough, going their respective ways; but no one

took any notice of him or turned to stare at his obviously English

appearance. He was even able to forget that with his tourist appearance

he was a false note in a charming picture, and he melted more and more

into the scene, feeling delightfully insignificant and unimportant and

unself-conscious. It was like becoming part of a softly coloured dream

which he did not even realise to be a dream.

On the eastern side the hill fell away more sharply, and the plain

below ran off rather suddenly into a sea of gathering shadows in which

the little patches of woodland looked like islands and the stubble

fields like deep water. Here he strolled along the old ramparts of

ancient fortifications that once had been formidable, but now were only

vision-like with their charming mingling of broken grey walls and

wayward vine and ivy. From the broad coping on which he sat for a

moment, level with the rounded tops of clipped plane trees, he saw the

esplanade far below lying in shadow. Here and there a yellow sunbeam

crept in and lay upon the fallen yellow leaves, and from the height he

looked down and saw that the townsfolk were walking to and fro in the

cool of the evening. He could just hear the sound of their slow

footfalls, and the murmur of their voices floated up to him through the

gaps between the trees. The figures looked like shadows as he caught

glimpses of their quiet movements far below.

He sat there for some time pondering, bathed in the

waves of murmurs and half-lost echoes that rose to his ears, muffled by

the leaves of the plane trees. The whole town, and the little hill out

of which it grew as naturally as an ancient wood, seemed to him like a

being lying there half asleep on the plain and crooning to itself as it

dozed.

And, presently, as he sat lazily melting into its

dream, a sound of horns and strings and wood instruments rose to his

ears, and the town band began to play at the far end of the crowded

terrace below to the accompaniment of a very soft, deep-throated drum.

Vezin was very sensitive to music, knew about it intelligently, and had

even ventured, unknown to his friends, upon the composition of quiet

melodies with low-running chords which he played to himself with the

soft pedal when no one was about. And this music floating up through

the trees from an invisible and doubtless very picturesque band of the

townspeople wholly charmed him. He recognised nothing that they played,

and it sounded as though they were simply improvising without a

conductor. No definitely marked time ran through the pieces, which

ended and began oddly after the fashion of wind through an AEolian

harp. It was part of the place and scene, just as the dying sunlight

and faintly breathing wind were part of the scene and hour, and the

mellow notes of old-fashioned plaintive horns, pierced here and there

by the sharper strings, all half smothered by the continuous booming of

the deep drum, touched his soul with a curiously potent spell that was

almost too engrossing to be quite pleasant.

There was a certain queer sense of bewitchment in it

all. The music seemed to him oddly unartificial.