Passing under the cool shadow of the gateway he stood wondering which way to go; then, saying to himself, "I'll go past the Mayor's house, I always liked it because of the painted walls," he turned to the right, and walked several paces before the strangeness of his own words struck him. "What can I have meant?" he asked himself, "and yet--I seem to remember a house, a white house, with a painted frieze of fruit and birds, and the Mayoress was a funny, fat old thing who made _échédets_. . . ." With his heart beating fast, he turned the corner and found himself at the house he sought. The more he looked at it the more he remembered it, and details crowded on him. He walked down the alley at the side, and found a stone stairway he knew quite well, a stairway that led to a carved door. He stumbled into the street again like a man distraught. "Has the horror turned my brain?" he thought. "Well, what matter, if it makes it easier to die?" The whole street struck him as familiar, but not until he turned into the Square did knowledge flash upon him. "It's my town!" he cried aloud, "it's my town!" He felt no perplexity at the incredible nature of the thing, a calming influence, too gracious to be akin to his former stupor, stole over him; he moved as in a dream, with no responsibility, but full enjoyment. The naked plane-trees made a silvery network against the cold, pure blue of the winter sky; into a raised washhouse across the Square the sun shone obliquely, and the many-hued skirts of the stooping women made vivid blotches of colour that harmonized with the rhythmic splash of the water as only music of sight can with music of sound. Dark against the cream-washed wall of the church, that seemed almost lambent in the glare of the sun, sat a row of burnt-out old men with shrivelled throats, and on the steps of the fountain were two old women in black, one wearing a white cap of folded wings, the other the wide-brimmed black straw hat common to the peasantry. The lady of the hat plunged her brown old fingers into the thin arc of water, and Bernardy saw how the drops that clung to her hand glittered like diamonds before she shook them off to pit the dust with pock-marks. With that intense sympathy which had done much to make him an artist, Bernardy tried for a moment to think himself into the mind of the black-hatted old woman, and to imagine the Square and his own figure from her mental and physical point of view. It was a favourite trick of his, but one of which latterly the strain had been too much for him. Sometimes he would succeed so well for a flash that it only made the impalpable but stern barrier of personality more definite even while almost seeming to overleap it. "If I could only achieve the thing properly," thought Bernardy, "I suppose I should attain exchange of identity, or at least be absorbed into that of the old lady. And then--no more of this black horror, and the shell of me would, I suppose, disfigure the gravel."