The season was that which precedes the first atmospheric intimations of spring. The snow had gone, and the ground was dry, and everything that was shabby and stark and colourless in Cambridge was admitting its inestimable obligation in the past to the loveliness of foliage. There was little of the sympathetic mystery of night in the long street in which Hewitt found himself on leaving his building; its lines of irregular wooden houses, aggressive with painty reflections of the dazzling arc-lights swung at intervals overhead, stretched away in distinct and uninviting perspective. Except where the gaslit sidestreets yawned murkily down to the river, Cambridge was hideous in the rectilinear nakedness of March. The university town is, as a rule, so very still after twelve o’clock that its occasional sounds come to have an individuality to one who prowls about, that the sounds of day do not possess. Intent as he was in pondering over the disheartening things Curtiss had been saying to him, Hewitt’s ears were keen, as he sauntered up the street with his hands in his pockets, to all the night noises he had learned to know so well. A student in a ground-floor room ablaze with light was reading aloud. Horace stopped a moment, and laughed at the sleepy voice droning wearily through the open window,--some one was taking his education hard. A policeman, half a block ahead of him, was advancing slowly down the street by a series of stealthy disappearances into shadowed doorways; Hewitt could hear him rattle the doorknobs before he emerged again to glitter a moment under the electric light; a car that had left town at half-past twelve was thumping faintly along somewhere between Boston and the Square--it might have been a great distance away, so intensely still was the intervening suburb; and through all the flat, silent streets the night air, cool and pungent with the damp of salt marshes, blew gently up from the Charles and intensified the atmosphere of emptiness.