Victor had just opened the door and taken his young wife in his arms to carry her over the threshhold, when the agent, Judgeworth, stepped out of the bushes and asked him if he did not think this the right moment to buy a good, solid insurance policy. Marietta laughed and Victor said, “Certainly not!”

He was a stranger in this small town. He knew nobody here and from the moment that he left the railway-station in that dark night, he was overcome by a feeling of being very much alone; the emptiness of an unknown provincial town on the last evening of the year is colder and larger than any other form of loneliness.

Later—much later, when he had been for a long time that full-grown man they’d promised him as child—he still sometimes was caught by that feeling of being followed on a lonely road, sometimes by figures without a name and almost without a form, but mostly just by the eyes.