Supposing, after all, that his ears should fail him.  Supposing they were capable of being tricked, without his being able to know it.  Supposing that that cachorra should come and go, and he, Boaz, living in some vast delusion, some unrealized distortion of memory, should let him pass unknown.  Supposing precisely this thing had already happened!

Or the other way around.  What if he should hear the footfalls coming, even into the very shop itself?  What if he should be as sure of them as of his own soul?  What, then, if he should strike?  And what then, if it were not that cachorra after all?  How many tens and hundreds of millions of people were there in the world?  Was it possible for them all to have footfalls distinct and different?

Then they would take him and hang him.  And that cachorra might then come and go at his own will, undisturbed.

As he sat there sometimes the sweat rolled down his nose, cold as rain.

Supposing!

Sometimes, quite suddenly, in broad day, in the booming silence of the night, he would start.  Not outwardly.  But beneath the pale integument of his skin all his muscles tightened and his nerves sang.  His breathing stopped.  It seemed almost as if his heart stopped.

Was that it?  Were those the feet, there, emerging faintly from the distance?  Yes, there was something about them.  Yes!  Memory was in travail.  Yes, yes, yes!  No!  How could he be sure?  Ice ran down into his empty eyes.  The footfalls were already passing.  They were gone, swallowed up already by time and space.  Had that been that cachorra?

Nothing in his life had been so hard to meet as this insidious drain of distrust in his own powers; this sense of a traitor within the walls.  His iron-gray hair had turned white.  It was always this now, from the beginning of the day to the end of the night:  how was he to know?  How was he to be inevitably, unshakably, sure?

Curiously, after all this purgatory of doubts, he did know them.  For a moment at least, when he had heard them, he was unshakably sure.

It was on an evening of the winter holidays, the Portuguese festival of Menin’ Jesus.  Christ was born again in a hundred mangers on a hundred tiny altars; there was cake and wine; songs went shouting by to the accompaniment of mandolins and tramping feet.  The wind blew cold under a clear sky.  In all the houses there were lights; even in Boaz Negro’s shop a lamp was lit just now, for a man had been in for a pair of boots which Boaz had patched.  The man had gone out again.  Boaz was thinking of blowing out the light.  It meant nothing to him.

He leaned forward, judging the position of the lamp-chimney by the heat on his face, and puffed out his cheeks to blow.  Then his cheeks collapsed suddenly, and he sat back again.

It was not odd that he had failed to hear the footfalls until they were actually within the door.  A crowd of merry-makers was passing just then; their songs and tramping almost shook the shop.