Arrived at the level, he found he had for the moment lost sight of his quarry. He strolled up and down, gathering what shade he could from the awnings. Voluble market-women, waxing tropically gross in their vegetable hotbeds, rallied him on his insensibility to their cajolery. Stolid Flemish farmers, with great pipes pendulous from their mouths, like tongues lolling and smoking with drought, winked to one another as he passed in appreciation of the rich joke that here was a foreigner. The gentler classes, it seemed, were all in siesta. Low life, vehement, motley, and picturesque, held the square as if it were a fortress under fire. Now, whether as a consequence or, in spite of, this gregal plebeianism, a strange unusual atmosphere, Ned fancied, was abroad in the town. He had been conscious of a similar atmosphere in other cities he had visited _en route_, and of an increase in its density in steady ratio with his march southwards. It was not to be defined. It might have been called an inflection rather than any expression, like the change of note in the respiration of a sleeper who is near waking. It only seemed to him that he moved in an element compounded of shadows--the shadow of watchfulness; the shadow of insolence; the shadow of an evil humour cursing its own century-long blindness; the shadow of a more wickedly merry humour, rallying itself upon that old desperate screwing-up of its courage to attack a boggart Blunderbore that had fallen to pieces at the first stroke; the shadow, embracing all others, of a certain Freemasonry that was deadlily exclusive in the opposite to a conventional sense. “And this is for no dispassionate soul to resent,” thought Mr Murk, who as a child had set his feet square upon the basis of an independent impartiality, and, at the first age of reason, had pledged himself to forego impulse as being the above-proof of ardent spirits and fatal to sobriety. “Now,” he admitted to himself, “Jacques Bonhomme is simply awaking to knowledge of the fact that he may boast a family-tree as thick-hung as his lord’s with evil fruit, and that he was not spawned of the mud because no record exists of his grandfather.” By-and-by, strolling down a little court, he turned into a wine-shop for a draught to his dusty throat. He drank his _maçon_, mixing it with water, in a tiny room off the tap of the auberge; and, while he was drinking, the sound of a low vehement voice in the street brought him to the window. He looked out. It was his very Madonna of the butterflies, and presented under a new aspect. Her hands were at the neck of the child; she was rating him in voluble viraginian. The poor rogue sobbed and protested; but he would not loose his grip of something of which she strove to possess herself. “_P’tit démon_!” she gabbled--“but I will have it, I say! It is no use to weep and struggle. Give it me, Baptiste--ah! but I will!” “No, no!” cried the boy; “it is mine--it has always been mine. Thou shalt not, Nicette!”