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remembering how he had struggled through the longer words by breaking them up into their individual syllables, so that one difficult word became two easier ones. Ever since then, books had been his constant companions. He had, perhaps, sacrificed real friendships to these simulacra, because there were days when he had avoided his chums after school or ignored their knocking on his front door when his parents’ house was otherwise empty, taken an alternative route home or stayed away from the windows so that he could be sure that no football game or exploration of orchards would get in the way of finishing the story that had gripped him.
    In a way, books had also been partly responsible for his fatal tentativeness with the girl from Accounts. She seemed to read a little—he had seen her with a Georgette Heyer novel, and the occasional Agatha Christie mystery from the library—but he had the sense that it was not a passion with her. What if she insisted that they spend hours at the theater, or the ballet, or shopping, simply because it meant that they would be “doing things together”? That was, after all, what couples did, wasn’t it? But reading was a solitary pursuit. Oh, one could read in the same room as someone else, or beside them in bed at night, but it rather presumed that an agreement had been reached about such matters, and the couple in question consisted of a pair of like-minded souls. It would be a disaster to find oneself embroiled with the sort of person who read two pages of a novel and then began humming, or tapping her fingers to attract attention, or, God help us, fiddling with the dial on the wireless. The next thing one knew, she’d be making “observations” on the text in hand, and once that happened there would be no peace forever after.
    But as he sat alone in the kitchen of his deceased mother’s house, it struck Mr. Berger that he had never troubled himself to find out the views of the girl in Accounts on the subject of books or, indeed, ballet. Deep inside, he had been reluctant to disturb his ordered lifestyle, a world in which he rarely had to make a more difficult decision than selecting the next book to read. He had lived his life at one remove from the world around him, and now he was paying the price in madness.
V
    In the days that followed, Mr. Berger subsisted largely on newspapers and magazines of an improving nature. He had almost convinced himself that what he had seen on the track was a psychological anomaly, some form of delayed reaction to the grief he had experienced at his mother’s death. He noticed that he was the object of peculiar looks, both poorly concealed and unashamedly open, as he went about his business in the town, but that was to be expected. He did hope that the town’s memory of the unproductive police search might fade eventually. He had no desire to be elevated to the role of local eccentric.
    But as time wore on, something odd happened. It is usual in the manner of experiences such as Mr. Berger’s that, as distance grows from the event in question, so too the memory of it becomes foggier. Mr. Berger should, if the ordinary rules of behavior were being obeyed, have become ever more certain of the psychologically troubling nature of his encounter with the young woman reminiscent of Anna Karenina. But Mr. Berger found himself believing with greater and greater conviction that the opposite was true. He had seen the woman, and she was real, admittedly allowing for a certain latitude in one’s definition of reality.
    He began reading again, tentatively at first, but soon with his previous immersion. He also returned to walking the path that wound down to the railway line, and sitting on his stile to watch the trains go by. Each evening, with the approach of the express from Exeter to Plymouth, he would set aside his book, and watch the rougher trail to the south. It was darker now, and the trail was harder to see,