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. Eyes were waiting then in shadowblack hiding places, like small windows of cellars and peepholes in front-doors and especially behind the meshes of lace-curtains, impenetrable from the outside but giving from the inside a view on the silent road and on him. Never ordinary eyes; never eyes looking without meaning, but forcing, peeping, peering, willing eyes, eyes like double-barrelled guns, like secret weapons, transmitters of vibrations or beams ;he didn’t know a name for it but it was a force, a will to paralyze and kill. As a full-grown man, he knew that he should laugh at himself for it and proceed calmly without quickening his step, and that he should think about quite different things then;but as a child he didn’t know that yet.

 It all started when he had to walk home all by himself for the first time after his weekly visit to Aunt: a little boy in the cold twilight of an autumn afternoon, in the silence between the widely separated, stiff and stately houses, and then behind him the windows with the starched lace-curtains with Aunt sitting very near to them to be able to see without being seen over the whole length of Longalley. And he;still a little boy and used to finding a strong and full-grown hand to guide him and to keep him away from loneliness and danger;he knew again suddenly that dark parlor he’d just left, but weirder now, and Aunt, more big and wordless, watching him proceed over Longalley; and there he understood for the first time that her eyes were capable of harm because against his back and then creeping up to the inside of his skull he felt the unspoken order to stop, to stand still, stand still halfway up Longalley where there was nobody else and where mist and night and cold were closing in.