He looked up with a sudden start. Something--he could not describe what--like the silence that succeeds the heavy slamming of a door, seemed to have gripped the world. The heat for days had been immense and cruel. Men, roysterers and blasphemers, were come to a mean inclination to expend what little breath was left to them in prayer. A habit of stealthily examining the face of the heavens for signs significant of the approaching “black death” of the storm was common. The water seemed to steam in the kennels, the lead to crackle in the gutters. Some inhuman outcome, it was predicted, of these unnatural conditions must result. And now at last had the plague-stroke fallen? Whatever it was--this inexplicable turn of the wheel--the tension of existence drew to near snapping-point under it. Poor souls crept for pools of shadow as if these were Bethesdas; here and there one dropped upon the pavement, and was rescued, as under fire, by a companion; the wail of half-stifled infants came through open windows; the sun was a crown of thorns to the earth. The streets, at the flood of noon, grew almost untenable. Ned--perhaps from some vague association of ideas, the result of his dreamings upon English lanes--left the town and, with the desire for trees compelling him, took half-unconsciously the Méricourt road. It may have been instinct merely that directed him. He had thought since his coming--how could he help it?--of Théroigne, of Nicette, of all his old connection with the strange little village. But he had no desire to renew his acquaintance with the people of that ancient comedy--so, now, it seemed to him. And surely by this time a new piece must hold the stage; the old masks must be crumbled away or repainted to other expressions. It was so long ago. He had leapt the boundary-river of youth in the interval. He could have no place at last in the life of the little hamlet by the woods. It may have been the sudden realisation of this, his grown emancipation, that tempted him all in a moment, and quite strangely, to the desire to look once more upon the scenes that, until within the last few minutes, he had had no least wish to revisit. It may have been that he was driven onward simply by the goad of his most haunting distress--that fancy of Mr Sheridan greatly profiting by a rival’s absence--and by the thought of the intolerable period of mental suspense and bodily discomfort he must suffer down there in the town, until his interview with M. de Lawoestine should give a direction one way or the other to his mission. Such considerations may have urged him; or--with a bow of deference to the necessitarians--no consideration at all, but a fatality.