His outstretched hand touched Hugh's sleeve, and he vanished on the instant with a sharp hiccup.
There was no one in the house, and nothing to eat but a half-consumed and repellent-looking pudding left over from the "night" before, which he finished for lack of anything else rather than out of any attraction the suety object had as a breakfast dish. Then he left the house in search of the other Atavar.
The light was bright and cheerful as always, but he felt chilly all the same. Discovering where he was had destroyed all of his amusement in the town's crazy construction, and taken the warmth out of his bones. He eyed the passers-by uneasily, wondering as each one approached him whether he was seeing a prisoner like himself, a soul in eternal torment, or an emissary of the Fallen whose real form was ambiguous.
For the rest of the morning he roamed the streets in search of a likely-looking figure, but finally he had to admit that his wanderings were fruitless. He sat down on a doorstep to think it out.
His Atavars were the "symbols of his error"; they were night-prowlers, obviously, because he had been one himself, gun in hand. The error itself was something to do with Jeremy Wright and Evelyn—not the impending murder, because it had not been committed, but some other error. The man in the top hat had been chosen, perhaps, because he had conceived of Wright as a cavalier, a suave homebreaker, or something of the sort; dinner clothes made a pointed symbol of such a notion. Of what else, specifically, had he suspected Jeremy? Tom-catting!
He groaned and dropped his head in his hands, remembering the cat he had seen in conjunction with his first sight of the man in dinner clothes. How was he to find one ragged alley-cat in a town where there were doubtless hundreds? Cats did not wear period costumes. He couldn't go around touching cats until something happened!
He heard a sniffing sound and a thin mournful whine at his side. He looked down.
"Go 'way," he said. "I want a cat, not a mongrel pooch."
The puppy, recoiling at the unfriendly tone, dropped its tail and began to sidle away from him, and gloomily he watched it go. Brown dog?—Brown cat?—Brown dog! An inspiration!