"Perhaps. But there is some hidden thing in life whose memory is everlasting. All the philosophers say so, especially those who are inclined to deny the Deity. They put their faith in the chain of cause and effect. What we have done,—you and I, Valentine,—must have an effect of some sort."

"It will have a very bad effect upon you, I can see," said Valentine, smiling, "unless you pull yourself together. Come, this is nonsense. We have sat once too often, and the consequence followed, and is over: I went into a trance. I have fortunately come out of it, so the penalty which you so firmly believe in has been paid. The score is cleared, Julian."

"I suppose so."

"I have no doubt of it. Let us forget the whole matter, since to remember it seems likely to affect those devils that make the hell of the physical man—the nerves. Let us forget it. Where are you dining to-night?"

"Nowhere in particular. I have not thought about it," Julian said, rather listlessly.

"Dine with me then."

"Yes, Valentine."

Julian hesitated, then added:

"But not in Victoria Street, if you don't mind."

"At the Savoy then; or shall we say the Berkeley?"

"Very well,—the Berkeley."

"At eight o'clock. Good-bye till then. I must ask you to give the shelter of your roof to Rip till he returns to a more reasonable frame of mind about me."

When Valentine had gone Julian put on his coat, and walked down to the club, ostensibly to look at the evening papers, really because he had a desire to see Marr. His intention, if he did meet the latter, was to question him closely as to the consequences which might follow upon a sitting, or series of sittings, undertaken by two people for some reason unsuited to carry out such an enterprise together. That Marr would be in the club he felt no shadow of doubt. Apparently the club had for Marr all the attraction that induces the new member to haunt the smoking and reading rooms of his freshly acquired home during the first week or two of its possession. He was incessantly there, as Julian had had reason to know.

But to-day proved to be an exception. Julian explored the club from end to end without finding the object of his search. Finally he went to the hall-porter.

"Is Mr. Marr in the club to-day?"

"No, sir; he has not been in at all since yesterday afternoon."

"Oh, thanks."

Julian felt strongly, even absurdly, disappointed, and found himself wishing that he possessed Marr's private address. He would certainly have called upon him. However, he had no idea where Marr lived, so there was nothing to be done. He went back to his rooms, dressed for dinner, and was at the Berkeley by five minutes past eight. The restaurant was very crowded that night, but Valentine had secured a table in the window, and was waiting when Julian arrived. The table next to theirs was the only one unoccupied in the room.

The two friends sat down and began to eat rather silently in the midst of the uproar of conversation round them. Valentine seemed quite unconscious of the many glances directed towards him. He never succeeded in passing unnoticed anywhere, and although he had never done anything remarkable, was one of the best-known men in town merely by virtue of his unusual personality.

"There's the Victoria Street Saint," murmured a pretty girl to her companion. "What a fortune that man could make on the stage."

"Yes, or as a pianist," responded the man, rather enviously. "His looks would crowd St. James's Hall even if he couldn't play a note. I never can understand how Cresswell manages to have such a complexion in London. He must take precious good care of himself."

"Saints generally do. You see, we live for time, they for eternity. We only have to keep the wrinkles at bay for a few years, but they want to look nice on the Judgment Day."

She was a little actress, and at this point she laughed to indicate that she had said something smart. As her laugh was dutifully echoed by the man who was paying for the dinner, she felt deliriously clever for the rest of the evening.

Presently Julian said:

"I went to the club this afternoon."

"Did you?"

"Yes. I wanted to have a talk with that fellow Marr."

Valentine suddenly put down the glass of champagne which he was in the act of raising to his lips.

"But surely," he began, with some appearance of haste. Then he seemed to check himself, and finished calmly:

"You found him, I suppose?"

"No."

"I thought he was perpetually there, apparently on the lookout for you."

"Yes, but to-day he hadn't been in at all. Perhaps he has gone out of town."

"Ah, probably."

At this moment two men entered the restaurant and strolled towards the table next to that at which Valentine and Julian sat. One of them knew Julian and nodded as he passed. He was just on the point of sitting down and unfolding his napkin when a sudden thought seemed to strike him, and he came over and said to Julian:

"You remember that dinner at Lady Crichton's, where we met the other night?"

"Yes."

"Startling bit of news to-night, wasn't it? Damned sudden!"

Julian looked puzzled.

"What—is Lady Crichton ill, then?"

"Lady Crichton! No. I meant about that poor fellow, Marr."

Julian swung round in his seat and regarded the man full in the face.

"Marr! Why, what is it? Has he had an accident?"

"Dead!" the other man said laconically, arranging the gardenia in his coat, and taking a comprehensive survey of the room.

"Dead!" Julian repeated, without expression. "Dead!"

"Yes. Well, bye-bye. Going on to the Empire!"

He turned to go, but Julian caught his arm.

"Wait a moment. When did he die?"

"Last night. In the dead of the night, or in the early morning."

"What of?"

"They don't know. There's going to be an inquest. The poor chap didn't die at home, but in a private hotel, in the Euston Road, the 'European.' He's lying there now. Funny sort of chap, but not bad in his way. I expect—"

Here the man bent down and murmured something into Julian's ear.

"Well, see you again presently. 'In the midst of life,' eh?"

He lounged away and began applying his intellect to the dissection of a sardine.

Julian turned round in his chair and again faced Valentine. But he did not go on eating the cutlet in aspic that lay upon his plate. He sat looking at Valentine, and at last said:

"How horribly sudden!"

"Yes," Valentine answered sympathetically. "He must have had a weak heart."

"I dare say. I suppose so. Valentine, I can't realize it."

"It must be difficult. A man whom you saw so recently, and I suppose apparently quite well."

"Quite. Absolutely."

Julian sat silent again and allowed the waiter to take away his plate with the untouched cutlet.

"I didn't like the man," he began at last. "But still I'm sorry, damned sorry, about this. I wanted to see him again. He was an awfully interesting fellow, Val; and, as I told you, might, I believe, in time have gained a sort of influence over me,—not like yours, of course, but he certainly had a power, a strength, about him, even a kind of fascination. He was not like other people. Ah—" and he exclaimed impatiently, "I wish you had met him."

"Why?"

"I scarcely know. But I should like you to have had the experience. And then, you are so intuitive about people, you might have read him. I could not. And he was a fellow worth reading, that I'm certain of. No, I won't have any mutton. I seem to have lost my appetite over this."

Valentine calmly continued his dinner, while Julian talked on about Marr rather excitedly. When they were having coffee Valentine said:

"What shall we do to-night? It is only a quarter past nine. Shall we go anywhere?"

"Oh no, I think not—wait—yes, we will."

Julian drank his coffee off at a gulp, in a way that would have made him the despair of an epicure.

"Where shall we go, then?"

Julian answered:

"To the Euston Road. To the 'European.'"

"The 'European'!"

"Yes, Valentine; I must see Marr once more, even dead. And I want you to see him. It was he who made the strangeness in our lives. But for him these curious events of the last days would not have happened. And isn't it peculiar that he must have died just about the time you were in your trance?"

"I do not see that. The two things were totally unconnected."

"Perhaps. I suppose so. But I must know how he died. I must see what he looks like dead. You will come with me?"

"If you wish it. But we may not be admitted."

"I will manage that somehow. Let us go."

Valentine got up. He showed neither definite reluctance nor excitement. They put on their coats in the vestibule and went out into the street. While they had been dining the weather, fine during the day, had changed, and rain was falling in sheets. They stood in the doorway while the hall-porter called a cab. Piccadilly on such a night as this looked perhaps more decisively dreary than a rain-soaked country lane, or storm-driven sand-dunes by the sea. For wet humanity, with wispy hair and swishing petticoats, draggled with desire for shelter, is a piteous vision as it passes by.

Valentine and Julian regarded it, turning up their coat collars and instinctively thrusting their hands deep into their pockets. Two soldiers passed, pursued by a weary and tattered woman, at whom they laughingly jeered as they adjusted the cloaks over their broad shoulders. They were hurrying back to barracks, and disregarded the woman's reiterated exclamation that she would go with them, having no home. A hansom went by with the glass down, a painted face staring through it upon the yellow mud that splashed round the horse's feet. Suddenly the horse slipped and came down. The glass splintered as the painted and now screaming face was dashed through it. A wet crowd of roughs and pavement vagabonds gathered and made hoarse remarks on the woman's dress as she was hauled out in her finery, bleeding and half fainting, her silk gown a prey to the mud, her half-naked shoulders a hostage to the wind. Two men in opera-hats, walked towards their club, discussing a divorce case, and telling funny stories through the rain. A very small, pale, and filthy boy stood with bare feet upon the kerbstone, and cried damp matches.

"How horrible London is to-night," Julian said as he and Valentine got into their cab.

"Yes. Why add to our necessary contemplation of its horrors? Why go on this mad errand?"

"I want you to see Marr," Julian replied, with a curious obstinacy. He pushed up the trap in the roof.

"Drive to the European Hotel, in the Euston Road," he said to the cabman. "D' you know it?"

"Yes, sir," the cabman said. He was smiling on his perch as he cracked his whip and drove towards the Circus.

The glass had been let down and the two friends beheld a continuously blurred prospect of London framed in racing raindrops and intersected by the wooden framework of the movable shutter. It was at the same time fantastic and tumultuous. The glare of light at the Circus shone over the everlasting procession of converging omnibuses, the everlasting mob of prostitutes and of respectable citizens waiting to mount into the vehicles whose paint proclaimed their destination. Active walkers darted dexterously to and fro over the cobblestones, occasionally turning sharply to swear at a driver whose cab had bespattered their black conventionality with clinging dirt. The drivers were impassively insulting, as became men placed for the moment in a high station of life. At the door of the Criterion Restaurant an enormously fat and white bookmaker in a curly hat and diamonds muttered remarks into the ear of an unshaven music-hall singer. A gigantic "chucker-out" observed them with the dull gaze of sullen habit, and a beggar-boy whined to them in vain for alms, then fluttered into obscurity. Fixed with corner stones upon the wet pavement of the "island" lay in an unwinking row the contents bill of the evening papers, proclaiming in gigantic black or red letters the facts of suicide, slander, divorce, murder, railway accidents, fires, and war complications. Dreary men read them with dreary, unexcited eyes, then forked out halfpence to raucous youths whose arms were full of damp sheets of pink paper. A Guardsman kissed "good-bye" to his trembling sweetheart as he chivalrously assisted her into a Marylebone 'bus, and two shop-girls, going home from work, nudged each other and giggled hysterically. Four fat Frenchmen stood in the porch of the Monico violently gesticulating and talking volubly at the tops of their voices. Two English undergraduates pushed past them with a look of contempt, and went speechlessly into the caf beyond. A lady from Paris, all red velvet and white ostrich-tips, smoothed her cheek with her kid glove meditatively, and glanced about in search of her fate of the dark and silent hours. And then—Valentine and Julian were in the comparative dimness of Shaftesbury Avenue—a huge red cross on a black background started out of the gloom above a playhouse. Julian shuddered at it visibly.

"You are quite unstrung to-night, Julian," Valentine said. "Let us turn the cab round and go home."

"No, no, my dear fellow; I am all right. It is only that I see things to-night much more clearly than usual. I suppose it is owing to something physical that every side of London seems to have sprung into prominence. Of course I go about every day in Piccadilly, St. James's Street, everywhere; but it is as if my eyes had been always shut, and now they are open. I can see London to-night. And that cross looked so devilishly ironical up there, as if it were silently laughing at the tumult in the rain. Don't you feel London to-night, too, Valentine?"

"I always feel it."

"Tragically or comically?"

"I don't know that I could say truly either. Calmly or contemptuously would rather be the word."

"You are always a philosopher. I can't be a philosopher when I see those hordes of women standing hour after hour in the rain, and those boys searching among them. I should be one of those boys probably but for you."

"If you were, I doubt whether I should feel horrified."

"Not morally horrified, I dare say, but intellectually disgusted. Eh?"

"I am not sure whether I shall permit my intellect quite so much license in the future as I have permitted it in the past," Valentine said thoughtfully.

His blue eyes were on Julian, but Julian was gazing out on Oxford Street, which they were crossing at that moment. Julian, who had apparently continued dwelling on the train of thoughts waked in him by the sight of the painted cross, ignored this remark and said:

"It is not my moral sense which shuddered just now, I believe, but my imagination. Sin is so full of prose, although many clever writers have represented it as splendidly decorated with poetry. Don't you think so, Val? And it is the prose of sin I realized so vividly just now."

"The wet flowers on the waiting hats, the cold raindrops on the painted faces, the damp boots trudging to find sin, the dark clouds pouring a benediction on it. I know what you mean. But the whole question is one of weather, I think. Vanity Fair on a hot, sweet summer night, with a huge golden moon over Westminster, soft airs and dry pavements, would make you see this city in a different light. And which of the lights is the true one?"

"I dare say neither."

"Why not both? The smartest coat has a lining, you know. I dare say there are velvet sins as well as plush sins, and the man who can find the velvet is the lucky fellow. Sins feel like plush to me, however, and I dislike plush. So I am not the lucky fellow."

"No, Valentine; you are wrong. I'm pretty sure all virtue is velvet and all vice is plush. So you stick to velvet."

"I don't know. Ask the next pretty dressmaker you meet. Bloomsbury is a genteel inferno on a wet night."

They traversed it smoothly on asphalt ways. All the time Valentine was watching Julian with a fixed and narrow scrutiny, which Julian failed to notice. The rows of dull houses seemed endless, and endlessly alike.

"I am sure all of them are full of solicitors," said Valentine.

Presently in many fanlights they saw the mystic legend, "Apartments." Then there were buildings that had an aged air and sported broken windows. Occasionally, on a background of red glass lit by a gas-jet from behind, sat the word "Hotel." A certain grimy degradation swam in the atmosphere of these streets. Their aspect was subtly different from the Bloomsbury thoroughfares, which look actively church-going, and are full of the shadows of an everlasting respectability which pays its water rates and sends occasional conscience-money to the Chancellor of the Exchequer. People looked furtive, and went in and out of the houses furtively. They crawled rather than pranced, and their bodies bore themselves with a depression that seemed indiscreet. Occasionally men with dripping umbrellas knocked at the doors under the red glass, and disappeared into narrow passages inhabited by small iron umbrella-stands. Night brooded here like a dyspeptic raven with moulting tail-feathers and ragged wings. But London is eloquent of surprises. The cab turned a corner, and instantly they were in a wide and rain-swept street, long and straight, and lined with reserved houses, that shrank back from the publicity of the passing traffic at the end of narrow alleys protected by iron gates. Over many of these gates appeared lit arches of glass on which names were inscribed: "Albion Hotel," "Valetta Hotel," "Imperial Hotel," "Cosmopolitan Hotel,"—great names for small houses. These houses had front doors with glass panels, and all the panels glowed dimly with gas.

The cab flashed by them, and Julian read the fleeting names, until his eyes were suddenly saluted with "European Hotel."

Violently the cabman drew up. The smoking horse was squeezed upon its haunches, and its feet slithered harshly along the stones. It tried to sit down, was hauled up by the reins, and stood trembling as the right wheel of the cab collided with the pavement edge, and the water in the gutter splashed up as if projected from a spray.

"Beg pardon, gents. I thought it was a bit further on," said the cabby, leering down cheerfully. "Nice night, sir, ain't it?"

He shook the reluctant drops of moisture from his waterproof-shrouded hat, and drove off.

Valentine opened the damp iron gate, and they walked up the paved alley to the door.



CHAPTER IV

THE EUSTON ROAD EPISODE

Opening the door, they found themselves in a squalid passage. A room on the left was fronted by a sort of counter, above which was a long window giving onto the passage, and as the shrill tinkle of a bell announced their entrance this window was pushed up, and the large red face and furtive observant eyes of a man stared upon them inquiringly.

"Do you require a room for the night?" he asked, in a husky voice, invaded by a strong French accent. "Because—"

"No," interrupted Julian.

The man nodded, and, strange to say, with apparent content.

"There is trouble in my house," he said. "I am unlucky; I come to England from my country to earn an honest living, and before two years, I have the police here last night."

"Yes," said Julian, "I know."

"What? You know it? Well, it is not my fault. The gentleman come last night with a lady, his wife, I suppose. How am I to know? He ask for a room. He look perfectly well. I give them the room. They go to bed. At four o'clock in the morning I hear a bell ring. I get up. I go on the landing to listen. I hear the bell again. I run to the chamber of the lady and gentleman. The lady is gone. The gentleman falls back on the bed as I come in and dies. Mon Dieu! It is—"

He suddenly paused in his excited narrative. Valentine had moved his position slightly and was now standing almost immediately under the gas-lamp that lit the glass door.

"You—you are relation of him?" he said. "You come to see him?"

"I have come to see him, certainly," said Valentine. "But I am no relation of his. This gentleman," and he pointed to Julian, "knew him well, and wished to look at him once more."

The landlord seemed puzzled. He glanced from Valentine to Julian, then back again to Valentine.

"But," he began, once more addressing himself to the latter, "you are like—there is something; when the poor gentleman fell on the bed and died he had your eyes. Yes, yes, you are relation of him."

"No," Valentine said; "you are mistaken."

"I should think so," exclaimed Julian. "Poor Marr's face was as utterly different from yours, Valentine, as darkness is different from light."

"No, no; it is not the eyes of the gentleman," the landlord continued, leaning forward through his window, and still violently scrutinizing Valentine,—"it is not the eyes. But there is something—the voice, the manner—yes, I say there is something, I cannot tell."

"You are dreaming, my friend," Valentine calmly interposed. "Now, Julian, what do you want to do?"

Julian came forward and leant his arm on the counter.

"I am the poor gentleman's great friend," he said. "You must let me see him."

The landlord held up his fat hands with a large gesticulation of refusal.

"I cannot, sir. To-morrow they remove him. They sit on the poor gentleman—"

"I know,—the inquest. All this is very hard upon you, an honest man trying to make an honest living."

Julian put some money into one of the agitated hands.

"My friend and I only wish to see him for a moment."

"Monsieur, I cannot. I—"

Julian insinuated another sovereign into his protesting fingers. They took it as an anemone takes a shrimp, and made a gesture of abdication.

"Well, if Monsieur is the friend of the poor gentleman, I have not the heart, I am tender-hearted, I am foolish—"

He disappeared muttering from the window, and in a moment appeared at a door on the left, disclosing himself now fully as a degraded, flaccid-looking, frouzy ruffian of a very low type, flashily dressed, and of a most unamiable expression. Taking a candlestick from a dirty marble-topped slab that projected from the passage-wall, he struck a match, lit the candle, and preceded them up the narrow flight of stairs, his boots creaking loudly at every step. On the landing at the top a smart maid-servant with a very pale face reconnoitered the party for a moment with furtive curiosity, then flitted away in the darkness to the upper regions of the house.

The landlord paused by a door numbered with a black number.

"He is in here," he whispered hoarsely. "Tomorrow they sit on him. After that he go from me. Mon Dieu! I am glad when he is gone. My custom he is spoilt. My house get a bad name, and like a dog they hang him. Mon Dieu!"

He opened the door stealthily, forming "St!" with his fat, coarse lips.

"I light the gas. It is all dark."

"No, no," Julian said, taking the candle from him, "I will do that. Go down."

He motioned him away, and entered the room, followed by Valentine, at whom the landlord again stared with a greedy consideration and curiosity, before turning to retreat softly down the narrow stairs.

They found themselves in a good-sized room, typically of London. It was full of the peculiar and unmistakable metropolitan smell, a stale odor of the streets that suggests smuts to the mind. Two windows, with a long dingy mirror set between them, looked out towards the Euston Road. Venetian blinds and thin white curtains looped with yellow ribbon shrouded them. On a slab that stuck out under the mirror was placed a bundle of curling-pins tied with white tape, a small brush and comb, and a bottle of cherry-blossom scent. Near the mirror stood a narrow sofa covered with red rep. Upon this lay a man's upturned top-hat, in the corner of which reposed a pair of reindeer gloves. A walking-stick with a gold top stood against the wall, in a corner by the marble mantlepiece. In the middle of the room lay a small open portmanteau, disclosing a disorder of shirts, handkerchiefs, and boots, a cheque-book, a bottle of brandy, and some brushes. By the fireplace there was a vulgar-looking arm-chair upholstered in red. The room was full of the faint sound of London voices and London traffic.

Julian went straight up to the gas chandelier and lit all three jets. His action was hurried and abrupt. Then he set the candle down beside the bundle of curling-pins, and turned sharply round to face the bed. The room was now a glare of light, and in this glare of light the broad bed with its white counterpane and sheets stood out harshly enough. The sheets were turned smoothly down under the blue chin of the dead man, who lay there upon his back, his face with fast-shut eyes dusky white, or rather grey, among the pillows. As Julian looked upon him he exclaimed:

"Good God, it isn't Marr! Valentine, it isn't Marr!"

"Not?"

"No. And yet—wait a moment—"

Julian came nearer to the bed and bent right down over the corpse. Then he drew away and looked at Valentine, who was at the other side of the bed.

"Oh, Valentine, this is strange," he whispered, and drawing a chair to the bedside, he sank down upon it. "This is strange. What is it death does to a man? Yes; this is Marr. I see now; but so different, so altered! The whole expression,—oh, it is almost incredible."

He stared again upon the face.

It was long in shape, thin and swarthy, very weary looking, the face of a man who had seen much, who had done very many, very various things. No face with shut eyes can look, perhaps, completely characteristic. Yet this face was full of a character that seemed curiously at war with the shape of the features and with the position of the closed eyes, which were very near together. Julian, in describing Marr to Valentine, had pronounced him Satanic, and this dead face was, in truth, somewhat Mephistophelean. An artist might well have painted it upon his canvas as a devil. But he must have reproduced merely the features and colouring, the blue, shaven cheeks, and hollow eye-sockets; for the expression of his devil he would have been obliged to seek another model. Marr, dead, looked serene, kind, gentle, satisfied, like a man who has shaken himself free from a heavy burden, and who stretches himself to realize the sudden and wonderful ease for which he has longed, and who smiles, thinking, "That ghastly thrall is over. I am a slave no longer. I am free." The dead face was wonderfully happy.

Julian seemed entirely fascinated by it. After his last smothered exclamation to Valentine, he sat, leaning one arm upon the head of the bed, gazing till he looked stern, as all utterly ardent observers look.

Valentine, too, was staring at the dead man.

There was a very long silence in the room. The rain leaped upon the tall windows on each side of the mirror and ran down them with an unceasing chilly vivacity. Lights from the street flickered through the blinds to join the glare of the gas. All the music of the town wandered round the house as a panther wanders round a bungalow by night. And the thin stream of people flowed by on the shining pavement beyond the iron railing of the narrow garden. They spoke, as they went, of all the minor things of life, details of home, details of petty sins, details of common loves and common hopes and fears, all stirring feebly under umbrellas. And close by these two friends, under three flaring gas-jets, watched the unwinking dead man, whose face seemed full of relief. Presently Julian, without looking up, said:

"Death has utterly changed him. He is no longer the same man. Formerly he looked all evil, and now it's just as if his body were thanking God because it had got rid of a soul it had hated. Yes, it's just like that. Valentine, I feel as if Marr had been rescued."

As he said the last words Julian looked up across the barrier of the bed at his friend. His lips opened as if to speak, but he said nothing; for he was under the spell of a wild hallucination. It seemed to him that there, under the hard glare of the gas-lamps, the soul of Marr spoke, stared from the pure, proud face of Valentine. That was like a possession of his friend. It was horrible, as if a devil chose for a moment to lurk and to do evil in the sanctuary of a church, to blaspheme at the very altar. Valentine did not speak. He was looking down on the dead serenity of Marr, vindictively. A busy intellect flashed in his clear blue eyes, meditating vigorously upon the dead man's escape from bondage, following him craftily to the very door of his freedom, to seize him surely, if it might be.

This is what Julian felt in his hallucination, that Valentine was pursuing Marr, uselessly, but with a deadly intention, a deadly hatred.

"Valentine!" Julian cried at last.

Valentine looked up.

And in an instant the spell was removed. Julian saw his friend and protector rightly again, calm, pure, delicately reserved. The death-chamber no longer contained a phantom. His eyes were no longer the purveyors of a terrible deception to his mind.

"Oh, Valentine, come here," Julian said.

Valentine came round by the end of the bed and stood beside him.

Julian examined him narrowly.

"Never stand opposite to me again, Valentine."

"Opposite to you! Why not?"

"Nothing, nothing. Or—everything. What is the matter with this room? and me? and you? And why is Marr so changed?"

"How is he changed? You know I have never seen his face before."

"You do not see it now. He has gone out of it. All that was Marr as I knew him has utterly gone. Death has driven it away and left something quite different. Let us go."

Julian got up. Valentine took up the candle from its place beside the curling-pins and lifted his hand to the gas-chandelier. He had turned out one of the burners, and was just going to turn out the two others when Julian checked him.

"No; leave them. Let the landlord put them out. Leave him in the light."

They went out of the room, treading softly. A little way up the staircase that led from the landing to the upper parts of the house a light flickered down to them, and they perceived the pale face of the housemaid diligently regarding them. Julian beckoned to her.

"You showed the gentleman—the gentleman who is dead—to his room last night?"

"Yes, sir. Oh, sir, I can't believe he's really gone so sudden like."

"Then you saw the lady with him?"

"Yes, of course. Oh—"

"Hush! What was she like?"

The housemaid's nose curled derisively.

"Oh, sir, quite the usual sort. Oh, a very common person. Not at all like the poor gentleman, sir."

"Young?"

"Not to say old, sir. No; I couldn't bring that against her. She wore a hat, sir, and feathers—well, more than ever growed on one ostrich, I'll be bound."

"Feathers!"

A vision of the lady of the feathers sprang up before Julian, wrapped in the wan light of the early dawn. He put several rapid questions to the housemaid. But she could only say again that Marr's companion had been a very common person, a very common sort of person indeed, and flashily dressed, not at all as she—the housemaid—would care to go out of a Sunday. Julian tipped her and left her amazed upon the dim landing. Then he and Valentine descended the stairs. The landlord was waiting in the passage in an attentive attitude against the wall. He seemed taken unawares by their appearance, but his eyes immediately sought Valentine's face, still apparently questioning it with avidity. Julian noticed this, and recollected that the man had insisted on a likeness existing between Marr and Valentine. Possibly that fact, although apparently unremembered, had remained lurking in his mind, and was accountable for his own curious deception. Or could it be that there really was some vague, fleeting resemblance between the dead man and the living which the landlord saw continuously, he only at moments? Looking again at Valentine he could not believe it. No; the landlord was deceived now, as he had been in the death-chamber above stairs.

"May we come into your room for a moment?" Julian asked the man. "I want to put to you a few questions."

"But certainly, sir, with pleasure."

He opened the side door and showed them into his sanctum beyond the glass window. It was a small, evil-looking room, crowded with fumes of stale tobacco. On the walls hung two or three French prints of more than doubtful decency. A table with a bottle and two or three glasses ranged on it occupied the middle of the floor. On a chair by the fire the Gil Bias was thrown in a crumpled attitude. One gas-burner flared, unshaded by any glass globe. Julian sat down on the Gil Bias. Valentine refused the landlord's offer of a chair, and stood looking rather contemptuously at the inartistic improprieties of the prints.

"Did you let in the gentleman who came last night?" asked Julian.

"But, sir, of course. I am always here. I mind my house. I see that only respect-"

"Exactly. I don't doubt that for a moment. What was the lady like,—the lady who accompanied him?"

"Oh, sir, very chic, very pretty."

"Didn't you hear her go out in the night?"

The landlord looked for a moment as if he were considering the advisableness of a little bluster. He stared hard at Julian and thought better of it.

"Not a sound, not a mouse. Till the bell rang I slept. Then she is gone!"

"Would you recognize her again?"

"But no. I hardly look at her, and I see so many."

"Yes, yes, no doubt. And the gentleman. When you went into his room?"

"Ah! He was half sitting up. I come in. He just look at me. He fall back. He is dead. He say nothing. Then I—I run."

"That's all I wanted to know," Julian said. "Valentine, shall we go?"

"By all means."

The landlord seemed relieved at their decision, and eagerly let them out into the pouring rain. When they were in the dismal strip of garden Julian turned and looked up at the lit windows of the bedroom on the first story. Marr was lying there in the bright illumination at ease, relieved of his soul. But, as Julian looked, the two windows suddenly grew dark. Evidently the economical landlord had hastened up, observed the waste of the material he had to pay for, and abruptly stopped it. At the gate they called a cab.

"No; let us have the glass up," Julian said; "a drop of rain more or less doesn't matter. And I want some air."

"So do I," said Valentine. "The atmosphere of that house was abominable."

"Of course there can be no two opinions as to its character," Julian said.

"Of course not."

"What a dreary place to die in!"

"Yes. But does it matter where one dies? I think not. I attach immense importance to where one lives."

"It seems horrible to come to an end in such a place, to have had that wretched Frenchman as the only witness of one's death. Still, I suppose it is only foolish sentiment. Valentine, did you notice how happy Marr looked?"

"No."

"Didn't you? I thought you watched him almost as if you wondered as I did."

"How could I? I had never seen him before."

"It was curious the landlord seeing a likeness between you and him."

"Do you think so? The man naturally supposed one of us might be a relation, as we came to see Marr. I should not suppose there could be much resemblance."

"There is none. It's impossible. There can be none!"

They rattled on towards Piccadilly, back through the dismal thoroughfares, towards the asphalt ways of Bloomsbury. Presently Julian said:

"I wish I had seen Marr die."

"But why, Julian? Why this extraordinary interest in a man you knew so slightly and for so short a time?"

"It's because I can't get it out of my head that he had something to do with our sittings, more than we know."

"Impossible."

"I am almost certain the doctor thought so. I must tell him about Marr's death. Valentine, let us drive to Harley Street now."

Valentine did not reply at once, and Julian said:

"I will tell the cabman."

"Very well."

Julian gave the order.

"I wonder if he will be in," Julian said presently. "What is the time?"

He took out his watch and held it up sideways until the light of a gas-lamp flashed on it for a moment.

"Just eleven. So late? I am surprised."

"We were a good while at the 'European.'"

"Longer than I thought. Probably the doctor will have come in, even if he has been out dining. Ah, here we are!"

The cab drew up. Julian got out and rang the bell in the rain.

"Is Doctor Levillier at home?"

"No, sir. He is out dining. But I expect him every moment. Will you come in and wait?" said the man-servant, who knew Julian well.

"Thanks; I think I will. I rather want to see him. I will just ask Mr. Cresswell. He's with me to-night."

Julian returned to the cab, in which Valentine was sitting.

"The doctor will probably be home in a few minutes. Let us go in and wait for him."

"Yes, you go in."

"But surely—"

"No, Julian," Valentine said, and suddenly there came into his voice a weariness, "I am rather tired to-night. I think I'll go home to bed."

"Oh," Julian said. He was obviously disappointed. He hesitated.

"Shall I come too, old chap? You're sure—you're certain that you are not feeling ill after last night?"

He leant with his foot on the step of the cab to look at Valentine more closely.

"No; I am all right. Only tired and sleepy, Julian. Well, will you come or stay?"

"I think I will stay. I want badly to have a talk with the doctor."

"All right. Good-night."

"Good-night!"

Valentine called his address to the cabman, and the man whipped up his horse. Just as the cab was turning round Valentine leaned out over the wooden door and cried to Julian, who was just going into the house:

"Give my best regards to the doctor, Julian."

The cab disappeared, splashing through the puddles.

Julian stood still on the doorstep.

"Who said that, Lawler?" he asked.

The servant looked at him in surprise.

"Mr. Valentine, sir."

"Mr. Valentine?"

"Yes, sir."

"Of course, of course. But his voice, didn't—didn't you notice-"

"It was Mr. Valentine's usual voice, sir," Lawler said, with increasing astonishment.

"I'm upset to-night," Julian muttered.

He went into the house and Lawler closed the street door.



CHAPTER V

THE HARLEY STREET EPISODE

Julian was a favourite in Harley Street, so Lawler did not hesitate to show him into the doctor's very private room,—a room dedicated to ease, and to the cultivation of a busy man's hobbies. No patient ever told the sad secrets of his body here. Here were no medical books, no appliances for the writing of prescriptions, no hints of the profession of the owner. Several pots of growing roses gravely shadowed forth the doctor's fondness for flowers. A grand piano mutely spoke of his love for music. Many of the books which lay about were novels; one, soberly dressed in a vellum binding, being Ouida's "Dog of Flanders." All the photographs which studded the silent chamber with a reflection of life were photographs of children, except one. That was Valentine's. The hearth, on which a fire flashed, was wide and had two mighty occupants, Rupert and Mab, the doctor's mastiffs, who took their evening ease, pillowing their huge heads upon each other's heaving bodies. The ticking clock on the mantelpiece was an imitation of the Devil Clock of Master Zacharius. There were no newspapers in the room. That fact alone made it original. A large cage of sleeping canaries was covered with a cloth. The room was long and rather narrow, the only door being at one end. On the walls hung many pictures, some of them gifts from the artists. Some foils lay on an ottoman in a far corner. The doctor fenced admirably, and believed in the exercise as a tonic to the muscles and a splendid drill-sergeant to the eyes.

As Julian came into the room, which was lit only by wax candles, he could not help comparing it with the room he had just left, in which the body of Marr lay. The atmosphere of a house is a strange thing, and almost as definite to the mind as is an appearance to the eye. A sensitive nature takes it in like a breath of fetid or of fresh air. The atmosphere of the European Hotel had been sinister and dreary, as of a building consecrated to hidden deeds, and inhabited mainly by wandering sinners. This home of a great doctor was open-hearted and receptive, frank and refined. The sleeping dogs, heaving gently in fawn-coloured beatitude, set upon it the best hall-mark. It was a house—judging at least by this room—for happy rest. Yet it was the abode of incessant work, as the great world knew well. This sanctum alone was the shrine of lotos-eating. The doctor sometimes laughingly boasted that he had never insulted it by even so much as writing a post-card within its four walls.

Julian stroked the dogs, who woke to wink upon him majestically, and sat down. Lawler quietly departed, and he was left alone. When he first entered the house he had been disappointed at the departure of Valentine. Now he felt rather glad to have the doctor to himself for a quiet half-hour. A conversation of two people is, under certain circumstances, more complete than a conversation of three, however delightful the third may chance to be. Julian placed Valentine before all the rest of the world. Nevertheless, to-night he was glad that Valentine had gone home to bed. It seems sometimes as if affection contributes to the making of a man self-conscious. Julian had a vague notion that the presence of his greatest friend to-night might render him self-conscious. He scarcely knew why. Then he looked at the mastiffs, and wondered at the extraordinary difference between men and the companion animals whom they love and who love them. What man, however natural, however independent and serene, could emulate the majestic and deliberate abandon of a big dog courted and caressed by a blazing fire and a soft rug? Man has not the dignity of soul to be so grandly natural. Yet his very pert self-consciousness, the fringed petticoats of affectation which he wears, give him the kennel, the collar, the muzzle, the whip, weapons of power to bring the dog to subjection. And Julian, as he watched Rupert and Mab wrapped in large lethargic dreams, found himself pitying them, as civilized man vaguely pities all other inhabitants of the round world. Poor old things! Sombre agitations were not theirs. They had nothing to aim at or to fight against. No devils and angels played at football with their souls. Their liaisons were clear, uncomplicated by the violent mental drum-taps that set the passions marching so often at a quickstep in the wrong direction. And Julian knelt down on the hearth-rug and laid his strong young hands on their broad heads. Slowly they opened their veiled eyes and blinked. One, Rupert, struck a strict tail feebly upon the carpet in token of acquiescence and gratified goodwill. Mab heaved herself over until she rested more completely upon her side, and allowed an enormous sigh to rumble through her monotonously. Julian enjoyed that sigh. It made him for the moment an optimist, as a happy child makes a dreary old man shivering on the edge of death an optimist. Dogs are blessed things. That was his thought. And just then the door at the end of the room opened quietly, and Doctor Levillier came in, with a cloak on and his crush-hat in his hand.

"I am glad to see you, Addison," he said.

The dogs shook themselves up onto their legs and laid their heads against his knees.

"Lawler, please bring my gruel."

"Yes, sir."

"Addison, will you have brandy or whisky?"

"Whisky, please, doctor."

Lawler took his master's cloak and hat, and the doctor came up to the fire.

"So Valentine has gone home to bed?" he said.

"Yes."

"He's all right, I hope?"

"Yes. Indeed, doctor, I thought him looking more fit than usual to-day, more alive than I have often seen him."

"I noticed that last night, when he revived from his trance. It struck me very forcibly, very forcibly indeed. But you—" and the doctor's eyes were on Julian's face—"look older than your age to-night, my boy."

He sat down and lit a cigar. The mastiffs coiled themselves at his feet rapturously. They sighed, and he sighed too, quietly in satisfaction. He loved the one hour before midnight, the hour of perfect rest for him. Putting his feet on Rupert's back, he went on:

"Last night's events upset you seriously, I see, young and strong though you are. But the most muscular men are more often the prey of their nervous systems than most people are aware. Spend a few quiet days. Fence in the morning. Ride—out in the country, not in the Park. Get off your horse now and then, tie him up at a lych-gate and sit in a village church. Listen to the amateur organist practising 'Abide with me,' and the 'Old Hundredth,' on the Leiblich Gedacht and the Dulciana, with the bourdon on the pedals. There's nothing like that for making life seem a slow stepper instead of a racer. And take Valentine with you. I should like to sit with him in a church at twilight, when the rooks were going home, and the organ was droning. Ah, well, but I must not think of holidays."

"Doctor, I like your prescription. Yes; I am feeling a bit out of sorts to-night. Last night, you see—and then to-day."

"Surely, Addison, surely you haven't been sitting—but no, forgive me. I've got your promise. Well, what is it?"

Julian replied quickly:

"That man I told you about, Marr, is dead."

Doctor Levillier looked decidedly startled. Julian's frequent allusions to Marr and evident strange interest in the man, had impressed him as it had impressed Valentine. However, he only said:

"Heart disease?"

"I don't know. There is going to be an inquest."

"When did he die?"

"Last night, or rather at four in the morning; just as Valentine came out of his trance, it must have been. Don't you remember the clock striking?"

"Certainly, I do. But why do you connect the two circumstances?"

"Doctor, how can you tell that I do?"

"By your expression, the tone of your voice."

"You are right. Somehow I can't help connecting them. I told Valentine so to-night. He has been with me to see Marr's body."

"You have just come from that deathbed now?"

"Yes."

Julian sketched rapidly the events of the European Hotel, but he left to the last the immense impression made upon him by the expression of the dead man.

"He looked so happy, so good, that at first I could not recognize him," he said. "His face, dead, was the most absolutely direct contradiction possible of his face, alive. He was not the same man."

"The man was gone, you see, Addison."

"Yes. But, then, what was it which remained to work this change in the body?"

"Death gives a strange calm. The relaxing of sinews, the droop of limbs and features, the absolute absence of motion, of breathing, work up an impression."

"But there was something more here,—more than peace. There was a—well, a strong happiness and a goodness. And Marr had always struck me as an atrociously bad lot. I think I told you."

The doctor sat musing. Lawler came in with the tray, on which was a small basin of gruel and soda-water bottles, a decanter of whisky, and a tall tumbler. Julian mixed himself a drink, and the doctor, still meditatively, took the basin of gruel onto his knees. As he sipped it, he looked a strange, little, serious ascetic, sitting there in the light from the wax candles, his shining boots planted gently on the broad back of the slumbering mastiff, his light eyes fixed on the fire. He did not speak again until he was half way through his gruel. Then he said:

"And you know absolutely nothing of Marr's past history?"

"No; nothing."

"I gather from all you have told me that it would be worthy of study. If I knew it I might understand the startling change from the aspect of evil to the aspect of good at death. I believe the man must have been far less evil than you thought him, for dead faces express something that was always latent, if not known, in the departed natures. Ignorantly, you possibly attributed to Marr a nature far more horrible than he ever really possessed."

But Julian answered:

"I feel absolutely convinced that at the time I knew him he was one of the greatest rips, one of the most merciless men in London. I never felt about any man as I did about him! And he impressed others in the same way."

"I wish I had seen him," Doctor Levillier said.

An idea, suggested by Julian's last remark, suddenly struck him.

"He conveyed a strong impression of evil, you say?"

"Yes."

"How? In what way, exactly?"

Julian hesitated.

"It's difficult to say," he answered. "Awfully difficult to put such a thing into words. He interested me. I felt that he had a great power of intellect, or of will, or something. But in every way he suggested a bad, a damnably bad, character. A woman said to me once about him that it was like an emanation."

"Ah!"

The doctor finished his gruel and put down the basin on the table beside him.

"By the way, where did Marr live? Anywhere in my direction? Would he, for instance, go home from Piccadilly, or the theatres, by Regent Street?"

"I don't know at all where he lived."

"Have you ever seen him with animals,—with dogs, for instance?"

"No."

"If he had been as evil as you suppose, any dog would have avoided him."

"Well, but dogs avoid perfection too."

"Hardly, Addison."

"But Rip and Valentine!"

The remark struck the doctor; that was obvious. He pushed his right foot slowly backwards and forwards on Rupert's back, rucking up the dog's loose skin in heavy folds.

"Yes," he said; "Rip is rather an inexplicable beggar. But do you mean to tell me he hasn't got over his horror of Valentine to-day?"

"This afternoon he was worse than ever. If Valentine had touched him, I believe he would have gone half mad. I had to put him out of the room."

"H'm!"

"Isn't it unaccountable?"

"I must say that it is. Dogs are such faithful wretches. If Rupert and Mab were to turn against me like that I believe it would strike at my heart more fiercely than the deed of any man could."

He bent down and ran his hand over Rupert's heaving back.

"The cheap satirist," he said, "is forever comparing the fickleness of men with the faithfulness of animals, but I don't mean to do that. I have a great belief in some human natures, and there are many men whom I could, and would, implicitly trust."

"There is one, doctor, whom we both know."

"Cresswell. Yes. I could trust him through thick and thin. And yet his own dog flies at him."

Doctor Levillier returned to that fact, as if it puzzled him so utterly that he could not dismiss it from his mind.

"There must be some curious, subtle reason for that," he said; "yet with all my intimate and affectionate knowledge of dogs I cannot divine it. Watch Rip carefully when he is not with Cresswell. Look after his health. Notice if he seems natural and happy. Does he eat as usual?"

"Rather. He did to-day."

"And he seems contented with you?"

"Quite."

"Well, all I can say is, that Rip doesn't seem to possess a dog nature. He is uncanny."

"Uncanny," Julian said, seizing on the word. "But everything has become uncanny within the last few days. Upon my word, when I look back into the past of, say, a fortnight ago, I ask myself whether I am a fool, or dreaming, or whether my health is going to the deuce. London seems different. I look on things strangely. I fancy, I imagine—"

He broke off. Then he said:

"By Jove, doctor, if half the men I know at White's could see into my mind they would think me fitted for a lunatic asylum."

"It doesn't matter to you what half the men, or the whole of the men at White's think, so long as you keep a cool head and a good heart. But it is as you say. You and Valentine have run, as a train runs into the Black Country, into an unwholesome atmosphere. In a day or two probably your lungs, which have drawn it in, will expel it again."

He smiled rather whimsically. Then he said:

"You know, Addison, men talk of their strength, and are inclined to call women nervous creatures, but the nerves play tricks among male muscles. Yes, you want the foils, the bicycle, the droning organ, and the village church. I advise you to go out of town for a week. Forget Marr, a queer fish evidently, with possibly a power of mesmerism. And don't ask Valentine to go away with you."

The last remark surprised Julian.

"But why not?" he asked.

"Merely because he is intimately connected with the events that have turned you out of your usual, your right course. I see that your mind is moving in a rather narrow circle, which contains, besides yourself, two people only, Marr and Cresswell."

"Darkness and light. Yes, it's true. How rotten of me," Julian exclaimed, like a schoolboy. "I'm like a squirrel in a cage, going round and round. That's just it. Valentine and Marr are in that cursed circle of our sittings, and so I insanely connect them with one another. I actually began to think to-night that Marr died, poor fellow, because—well—"

"Yes."

"Oh, it's too ridiculous, that his death had something to do with our last sitting. Supposing, as you say, he had a hypnotic power of any kind. Could—could its exercise cause injury to his health?"

But the doctor ignored the question in his quiet and yet very complete and self-possessed manner.

"Marr and Cresswell never met," he said. "It is folly to connect them together. It is, as you said," and he laughed, "rotten of you. Go away to-morrow."

"I will, you autocratic doctor. What fee do I owe you?"

"Your friendship, my boy."

Dr. Levillier sat lower in his chair, and they smoked in silence, both of them revelling in the warm peace and the ease of this night-hour. Since he had come into the Harley Street house Julian had been much happier. His perturbation had gradually evaporated until now scarcely a vestige of it remained. The little doctor's talk, above all the sight of his calm, thoughtful face and the aspect of his calm, satisfied room, gave the coup de grce to the uneasiness of a spurious and ill-omened excitement. When the power of wide medical knowledge is joined to the power of goodness and of umbrageous intellectuality, a doctor is, among all men, the man to lay the ghosts that human nature is perpetually at the pains to set walking in their shrouds to cause alarm. All Julian's ghosts were laid. He smoked on and grew to feel perfectly natural and comfortable. The dogs echoed and emphasized all the healing power of their small and elderly master. As they lay sleeping, a tangle of large limbs and supine strength, the fire shone over them till their fawn-coloured coats gleamed almost like satin touched with gold. The delightful sanctity of unmeasured confidence, unmeasured satisfaction, sang in their gentle and large-hearted snores, which rose and fell with the regularity of waves of the sea. Now and then one of them slowly stretched a leg or expanded the toes of a foot, as if intent on presenting a larger surface of sensation to the embrace of comfort and of affection. And they, so it seemed to Julian, kept the pleasant silence now come into existence between him and the doctor alive. That silence rested him immensely. In it the two cigars diminished steadily, steadily as the length of a man's life, but glowing to the very end. And the grey ashes dropped away of their own accord, and Julian's mind shed its grey ashes too and glowed serenely. The dogs expanded their warm bodies on the hearth, and his nature expanded in a vague, wide-stretching generosity of mute evening emotion.

"How comfortable this is, doctor," he murmured at last.

"Yes. It's a good hour," the doctor replied, letting the words go slowly from his lips. "I wish I could give to all the poor creatures in this city just one good hour."

They smoked their cigars out.

"I ought to go," Julian said lazily.

"No. Have one more. I know it is dangerous to prolong a pleasure. It loses its savour. But I think, Addison, to-night, you and I can get no harm from the experiment."

He handed Julian the cigar-box.

"We won't stir up the dogs for another half-hour," he added, looking at their happiness with a shining satisfaction. "Here are the matches. Light up."

Julian obeyed, and they began the delightful era of the second cigar, and sank a little deeper down, surely, into serenity and peace. Occasional coals dropping into the fender with a hot tick, tick, chirrupped a lullaby to the four happy companions. And the men learnt a fine silence from the fine silence of the dogs.

Half way through the second cigar Rupert shifted under his master's patent-leather boots and raised his huge head. His eyes blinked out of their sleep, then ceased to blink and became attentive. Then his ears, which had been lying down on each side of his head in the suavest attitude which such features of a dog can assume, lifted themselves up and pointed grimly forward as he listened to something. His flaccid legs contracted under him, and the muscles of his back quivered. Mab, less readily alert, quickly caught the infection of his attention, rolled over out of her sideways position and couched beside him. The movement of the dogs was not congenial to the doctor. Rupert's curious back, alert under his feet, communicated an immediate sense of disquiet to the very centre of his being. He said to Julian:

"The acuteness of animal senses has its drawbacks. These dogs must have heard some sound in the street that is entirely inaudible to us. Well, Rupert, what is it? Lie down again and go to sleep."

Stooping forward he put his hand on the dog's neck, and gave him a push, expecting him to yield readily, and tumble over onto the warm rug to sleep once more. But Rupert resisted his hand, and instead, got up, and stood at attention. Mab immediately followed his example.

"What are they after, doctor?" said Julian.

As he spoke a bell rang in the house.

"Nemesis for prolonging the pleasure," Levillier said. "A summons to a patient, no doubt."

As if in reply to the twitter of the bell, Rupert sprang forward and barked. He remained beside the door, waiting, while Mab barked too, nearer the fire. The bell sounded again, and the footstep of Lawler, who always sat up as late as his master, was heard on the stairs from the servants' part of the house. It passed them on its errand to the front door, but during its passage the excitement of the two dogs rapidly increased. They began to bark furiously and to bristle.

"I never saw them like this before," the doctor said, not without anxiety.

As he spoke Lawler opened the hall door. They heard the latch go and the faint voice of somebody in colloquy with him. For the dogs were now abruptly silent, but displayed the most curious savage intentness, showing their teeth, and standing each by the door as if sentinels on guard. The colloquy ceasing, steps again sounded in the hall, but more than Lawler's. Evidently the man was returning towards the room accompanied by somebody from the street. The doctor was keenly observing the mastiffs, and just as Lawler's hand struck upon the handle of the door to turn it, he suddenly called out sharply:

"Lawler, you are not to open the door!"

And as he called, the doctor ran forward between the two dogs and caught their collars in his two hands. They tugged and leaped to get away, but he held on. The surprised voice of the obedient Lawler was heard on the hither side of the door, saying:

"I beg your pardon, sir."

The doctor said hastily to Julian:

"These dogs will tear the person who has just come into the house to pieces if we don't take care. Catch on to Mab, Addison."

Julian obeyed, and the dog was like live iron with determination under his grasp.

"Some one is with you, Lawler," the doctor said. "Does he wish to see me?"

"If you please, sir, it is Mr. Cresswell, Mr. Valentine come back for Mr. Addison."

Julian felt himself go suddenly pale.



CHAPTER VI

THE STRENGTH OF THE SPRING

Rather reluctantly, Julian acted on the advice of Doctor Levillier and went out of town for a week on the following day. He took his way to the sea, and tried to feel normal in a sailing-boat with a gnarled and corrugated old salt for his only companion. But his success was only partial, for while his body gave itself to the whisper of the ungoverned breezes, while his hands held the ropes, and his eyes watched the subtle proceedings of the weather, and his ears listened to the serial stories of the waves, and to the conversational peregrinations of his Ancient Mariner about the China Seas in bygone days, his mind was still in London, still busily concerned itself with the very things that should now undergo a sea change and vanish in ozone. Recent events oppressed him, to the occasional undoing of the old salt, well accustomed to the seasick reverence of his despairing clients on board the Star of the Sea. When the mind of a man has once fallen into the habit of prancing in a circle like a circus horse, it is difficult to drive it back into the public streets, to make it trot serenely forward in its ordinary ways. And Julian had with him a ring-master in the person of the ignorant Rip. Whenever his eyes fell on Rip, curled uneasily in the bottom of the swinging boat, he went at a tangent back to Harley Street, and the strange finale of his evening with the doctor.

It had been a curious tableau divided by a door. Levillier and he stood on one side tugging mightily at the intent mastiffs, which strained at their collars, dropping beads of foam from their grinning jaws, savages, instead of calm companions. On the other side, in the hall, Lawler and Valentine paused in amazement, and a colloquy shot to and fro through the wooden barrier. On hearing the name of Valentine mentioned by the butler, the doctor had cast an instant glance of unbounded amazement upon Julian. And Julian had returned it, feeling in his heart the dawning of an inexplicable trouble.

"Is anything the matter?" Valentine's voice had asked.

"No," said the doctor in reply. "But please go into the dining-room. We will come to you there. And Lawler—"

"Yes, sir."

"When you have shown Mr. Cresswell to the dining-room, be careful to shut the door, and to keep it shut till I come."

"Yes, sir."

The butler's well-trained voice had vibrated with surprise and Julian had found himself mechanically smiling as he noted this. Then the footsteps of servant and visitor had retreated. Presently a door was heard to shut. Lawler returned, and was passing discreetly by, to wonder, in his pantry, if his master had gone mad, when the doctor again called to him.

"Go downstairs, Lawler, and in a moment I shall bring the dogs to you."

"Yes, sir."

The butler's voice was now almost shrill with scarcely governable astonishment, and his footsteps seemed to tremble uneasily upon the stairs as he retired. Then the doctor went to a corner of the room and took down from a hook a whip with a heavy thong.

"I haven't had to use this since they were both puppies," he said, with a side glance at the dogs. "Now, Addison, keep hold of Mab and go in front of me down the servants' stairs. If the dogs once get out of hand we shall have trouble in the house to-night."

The door was opened, and then a veritable affray began. The animals seemed half mad. They tore at their collars, and struggled furiously to break loose, snarling and even snapping, their great heads turned in the direction of the dining-room. The doctor, firmest as well as kindest of men, recognized necessity, and used the whip unsparingly, lashing the animals through the door to the servants' quarters, and down the stairs. It was a violent procession to the lower regions. Julian could not get it out of his head. Entangled among the leaping dogs on the narrow stairway, he had a sense of whirling in the eddies of a stream, driven from this side to the other. His arms were nearly pulled out of their sockets. The shriek of the lash curling over and around the dogs, the dim vision of the doctor's compressed lips and eyes full of unaccustomed fire, the damp foam on his hands as he rocked from one wall to the other, amid a dull music of growls, and fierce, low barks, came back to him now as he trimmed the sails to catch the undecided winds, or felt the tiller leap under his hold. Each moment he had expected to be bitten, but somehow they all tumbled together unhurt into Lawler's pantry, where they found that factotum standing grim and wire-strung with anticipation. Beyond the pantry were the dogs' night quarters, and they were quickly driven into them and shut up. But they still bounded and beat against the door, and presently began to howl a vain chorale.

"Lord, Lord, sir! what's come to them?" Lawler exclaimed.

His fat face had become as white as a sheet, and the doctor was scarcely less pale as he leaned against the dresser, whip in hand, drawing panting breaths.

"I can't tell. They will be all right in a minute."

He pulled himself up.

"Go to bed now if you like, Lawler," he said, rather abruptly. "Come, Addison."

They regained the hall, and made their way to Valentine. He was sitting by the dining-table in a watchful attitude, and sprang hastily up as they came in.

"My dear doctor," he said, "what a pandemonium! I nearly came to your assistance."

"It's very lucky you didn't, Cresswell," the doctor answered, almost grimly.

"Why?"

"Because if you had you might chance to be a dead man by this time."

Out on the sea, under the streaming clouds that fled before the wind, Julian recalled the strange terseness of that reply, and the perhaps stranger silence that followed it. For Valentine had made no comment, had asked for no explanation. He had simply dropped the subject, and the three men had remained together for a few minutes, constrained and ill at ease. Then the doctor had said:

"Let us go back now to my room."

Valentine and he assented, and got upon their feet to follow him, but when he opened the door there came up from the servants' quarters the half-strangled howling of the mastiffs. Involuntarily Dr. Levillier paused to listen, his hand behind his ear. Then he turned to the young men, and held out his right hand.

"Good-night," he said. "I must go down to them, or there will be a summons applied for against me in the morning by one of my neighbours."

And they let themselves out while he retreated once more down the stairs.

The drive home had been a silent one. Only when Julian was bidding Valentine good-night had he found a tongue to say to his friend:

"The devil's in all this, Valentine."

And Valentine had merely nodded with a smile and driven off.

Now, in the sea solitude that was to be a medicine to his soul, Julian went round and round in his mental circus, treading ever the same saw dust under foot, hearing ever the same whip crack to send him forward. His isolation bent him upon himself, and the old salt's hoarse murmurings of the "Chiney" seas in no way drew him to a healthier outlook. Why Valentine returned for him that night he did not know. That might have been merely the prompting of a vagrant impulse. Julian cursed that impulse, on account of the circumstances to which it directly led; for there was a peculiar strain of enmity in them which had affected, and continued to affect, him most disagreeably. To behold the instinctive hostility of another towards a person whom one loves is offensively grotesque to the observer, and at moments Julian hated the doctor's mastiffs, and even hated the unconscious Rip, who lay, in a certain shivering discomfort and apprehension, seeking sleep with the determination of sorrow. There are things, feelings, and desires, which should surely be kicked out of men and dogs. Such a thing, beyond doubt, was a savage hatred of Valentine. What prompted it, and whence it came, were merely mysteries, which the dumbness of dogs must forever sustain. But what specially plunged Julian into concern was the latent fear that Dr. Levillier might echo the repulsion of his dogs and come to look upon Valentine with different eyes. Julian's fine jealousy for his friend sharpened his faculties of observation and of deduction, and he had observed the little doctor's dry reception of Valentine after the struggle on the stairs, and his eager dismissal of them both to the street door on the howling excuse that rose up from the basement. Such a mood might probably be transient, and only engendered by the fatigue of excitement, or even by the physical exhaustion attendant upon the preservation of Valentine from the rage of Rupert and Mab. Julian told himself that to dwell upon it, or to conceive of it as permanent, was neither sensible nor acute, considering his intimate knowledge of the doctor's nature, and of his firm friendship for Valentine. That he did continue most persistently to dwell upon it, and with a keen suspicion, must be due to the present desolation of his circumstances, and to the vain babble of the blue-coated Methuselah, whose intellect roamed incessantly through a marine past, peopled with love episodes of a somewhat Rabelaisian character.

At the end of five days Julian abruptly threw up the sponge and returned to London, abandoning the old salt to the tobacco-chewing, which was his only solace during the winter season, now fast drawing to a close. He went at once to see Valentine, who had a narrative to tell him concerning Marr.

"You have probably read all about Marr in the papers?" he asked, when he met Julian.

The question came at once with his hand-grasp.

"No," Julian said. "I shunted the papers, tried to give myself up entirely to the sea, as the doctor advised. What has there been?"

"Oh, a good deal. I may as well tell it to you, or no doubt Lady Crichton will. People exaggerate so much."

"Why—what is there to exaggerate about?"

"The inquest was held," Valentine answered. "And every effort was made to find the woman who came with Marr to the hotel and evaporated so mysteriously, but there was no one to identify her. The Frenchman had not noticed her features, and the housemaid, as you remember, was a fool, and could only say she was a common-looking person."

"Well," Julian said, rather eagerly, "but what was the cause of death?"

"That was entirely obscure. The body seemed healthy—at least the various organs were sound. There was no obvious reason for death, and the verdict was, simply, 'Died from failure of the heart's action.'"

"Vague, but comprehensive."

"Yes; I suppose we shall all die strictly from the same cause."

"And that is all?"

"Not quite. It appears that a description of the dead man got into the papers and that he was identified by his wife, who read the account in some remote part of the country, took the train to town, and found that Marr was, as she suspected, the man whom she had married, from whom she had separated, and whose real name was Wilson, the Wilson of a notorious newspaper case. Do you remember it?"

"What, an action against a husband for gross cruelty, for incredible, unspeakable inhumanity—some time ago?"

"Yes. The wife got a judicial separation."

"And that is the history of Marr?"

"That is, such of his history as is known," Valentine said in his calm voice.

While he had been speaking his blue eyes had always been fixed on Julian's face. When Julian looked up they were withdrawn.

"I always had a feeling that Marr was secretly a wretch, a devil," Julian said now. "It seems I was right. What has become of the wife?"

"I suppose she has gone back to her country home. Probably she is happy. Her first mate chastised her with whips. To fulfil her destiny as a woman she ought now to seek another who is fond of scorpions."

"Women are strange," Julian said, voluptuously generalizing after the manner of young men.

Valentine leaned forward as if the sentence stirred some depth in his mind and roused him to a certain excitement.

"Julian," he exclaimed, "are you and I wasting our lives, do you think? Since you have been away I have thought again over our conversation before we had our first sitting. Do you remember it?"

"Yes, Valentine."

"You said then I had held you back from so much."

"Yes."

"And I have been asking myself whether I have not, perhaps, held you back, held myself back, from all that is worth having in life."

Julian looked troubled.

"From all that is not worth having, old boy," he said.

But he looked troubled. When Valentine spoke like this he felt as a man who stands at a garden gate and gazes out into the world, and is stirred with a thrill of anticipation and of desire to leap out from the green and shadowy close, where trees are and flowers, into the dust and heat where passion hides as in a nest, and unspoken things lie warm. Julian was vaguely afraid of himself. It is dangerous to lean on any one, however strong. Having met Valentine on the threshold of life, Julian had never learned to walk alone. He trusted another, instead of trusting himself. He had never forged his own sword. When Siegfried sang at his anvil he sang a song of all the greatness of life. Julian was notably strong as to his muscles. He had arms of iron, and the blood raced in his veins, but he had never forged his sword. Mistrust of himself was as a phantom that walked with him unless Valentine drove it away.

"I thought you had got over that absurd feeling, Val," he said. "I thought you were content with your soul."

"I think I have ceased to be content," said Valentine. "Perhaps I have stolen a fragment of your nature, Julian, in those dark nights in the tentroom. Since you have been away I have wondered. An extraordinary sensation of bodily strength, of enormous vigour, has come to me. And I want to test the sensation, to see if it is founded upon fact."

He was sitting in a low chair, and as he spoke he slowly stretched his limbs. It was as if all his body yawned, waking from sleep.

"But how?" Julian asked.

Already he looked rather interested than troubled. At Valentine's words he too became violently conscious of his own strength, and stirred by the wonder of youth dwelling in him.

"How? That is what I wish to find out by going into the world with different eyes. I have been living in the arts, Julian. But is that living at all?"

Julian got up and stood by the fire. Valentine excited him. He leaned one arm on the mantelpiece. His right hand kept closing and unclosing as he talked.

"Such a life is natural to you," he said. "And you have made me love it."

"I sometimes wonder," responded Valentine, "whether I have not trained my head to slay my heart. Men of intellect are often strangely inhuman. Besides, what you call my purity and my refinement are due perhaps to my cowardice. I am called the Saint of Victoria Street because I live in a sort of London cloister with you for my companion, and in the cloister I read or I give myself up to music, and I hang my walls with pictures, and I wonder at the sins of men, and I believe I am that deadly thing, a Pharisee."

"But you are perfectly tolerant."

"Am I? I often find myself sneering at the follies of others, at what I call their coarsenesses, their wallowing in the mire."

"It is wallowing."

"And which is most human, the man who drives in a carriage, or the man who walks sturdily along the road, and gets the mud on his boots, and lets the rain fall on him and the wind be his friend? I suspect it is a fine thing to be out unsheltered in a storm, Julian."

Julian's dark eyes were glowing. Valentine spoke with an unusual, almost with an electric warmth, and Julian was conscious of drawing very near to him tonight. Always in their friendship, hitherto, he had thought of Valentine as of one apart, walking at a distance from all men, even from him. And he had believed most honestly that this very detachment had drawn him to Valentine more than to any other human being. But to-night he began suddenly to feel that to be actually side by side with his friend would be a very glorious thing. He could never hope to walk perpetually upon the vestal heights. If Valentine did really come down towards the valley, what then? Just at first the idea had shocked him. Now he began almost to wish that it might be so, to feel that he was shaking hands with Valentine more brotherly than ever before.

"Extremes are wrong, desolate, abominable, I begin to think," Valentine went on. "Angel and devil, both should be scourged—the one to be purged of excessive good, the other of excessive evil, and between them, midway, is man, natural man. Julian, you are natural man, and you are more right than I, who, it seems, have been educating you by presenting to you for contemplation my own disease."

"Well, but is natural man worth much? That is the question! I don't know."

"He fights, and drinks, and loves, and, oftener than the renowned philosopher thinks, he knows how to die. And then he lives thoroughly, and that is probably what we were sent into the world to do."

"Can't we live thoroughly without, say, the fighting and the drinking, Val?"

Valentine got up, too, as if excited, and stood by the fire by Julian's side.

"Battle calls forth heroism," he said, "which else would sleep."

"And drinking?"

"Leads to good fellowship."

This last remark was so preposterously unlike Valentine that Julian could not for a moment accept it as uttered seriously. His mood changed, and he burst out suddenly into a laugh.

"You have been taking me in all the time," he exclaimed, "and I actually was fool enough to think you serious."

"And to agree with what I was saying?"

Valentine still spoke quite gravely and earnestly, and Julian began to be puzzled.

"You know I can never help agreeing with you when you really mean anything," he began. "I have proved so often that you are always right in the end. So your real theory of life must be the true one: but your real theory, I know, is to reject what most people run after."

"No longer that, I fancy, Julian."

"But, then, what has changed you?"

Valentine met his eyes calmly.

"I don't know," he said. "Do you?"

"I? How should I?"

"Perhaps this change has been growing within me for a long while. It is difficult to say; but to-night my nature culminates. I am at a point, Julian."

"Then you have climbed to it. Don't you want to stay there?"

"No mere man can face the weather on a mountain peak forever, and life lies rather in the plains."

Valentine went over to the window and touched the blind. It shot up, leaving the naked window, through which the gas-lamps of Victoria Street stared in the night.

"I wish," he said, "that we, in England, had the flat roofs of the East."

He thrust up the glass, and the night air pushed in.

"Come here, Julian," he said.

Julian obeyed, wondering rather. Valentine leaned a little out on the sill and made Julian lean beside him. It was early in the night and the hum of London was yet loud, for the bees did not sleep, but were still busy in their monstrous hive. There was already a gentleness of spring among the discoloured houses. Spring will not be denied, even among men who dwell in flats. The cabs hurried past, and pedestrians went by in twos and threes or solitary; soldiers walking vaguely, seeking cheap pleasures, or more gaily with adoring maidens; tired business men; journeying towards Victoria Station; a desolate shop-girl, in dreary virtue defiant of mankind, but still unblessed; the Noah's ark figure of a policeman, tramping emptily, standing wearily by turns, to keep public order. Lights starred here and there the long line of mansions opposite.

"I often look out here at night," Valentine said, "generally to wonder why people live as they do. When I see the soldiers going by, for instance, I have often marvelled that they could find any pleasure in the servants, so often ugly, who hang on their arms, and languish persistently at them under cheap hats and dyed feathers. And I gaze at the policeman on his beat and pity him for the dead routine in which he stalks, seldom varied by the sordid capture of a starving cracksman, or the triumphant seizure of an unmuzzled dog. The boys selling evening papers seem to me imps of desolation, screaming through life aimlessly for halfpence; and the cabmen, creatures driving for ever to stations, yet never able to get into the wide world. And yet they are all living, Julian; that is the thing: all having their experiences, all in strong touch with humanity. The newspaper-boy has got his flower-girl to give him grimy kisses; and the cabman is proud of the shine on his harness; and the soldier glories in his military faculty of seduction, and in his quick capacity for getting drunk in the glittering gin-palace at the corner of the street; and the policeman hopes to take some one up, and to be praised by a magistrate; and in those houses opposite intrigues are going on, and jealousy is being born, and men and women are quarrelling over trifles and making it up again, and children—what matter if legitimate or illegitimate?—are cooing and crying, and boys are waking to the turmoil of manhood, and girls are dreaming of the things they dare not pretend to know. Why should I be like a bird hovering over it all? Why should not I—and you—be in it? If I can only cease to be as I have always been, I can recreate London for myself, and make it a live city, fearing neither its vices nor its tears. I have made you fear them, Julian. I have done you an injury. Let us be quiet, and feel the rustle of spring over the gas-lamps, and hear the pulsing of the hearts around us."

He put his arm through Julian's as they leaned out on the sill of the window, and to Julian his arm was like a line of living fire, compelling that which touched it to a speechless fever of excitement. Was this man Valentine? Julian's pulses throbbed and hammered as he looked upon the street, and he seemed to see all the passers-by with eyes from which scales had fallen. If to die should be nothing to the wise man, to live should be much. Underneath, two drunken men passed, embracing each other by the shoulders. They sang in, snatches and hiccoughed protestations of eternal friendship. Valentine watched their wavering course with no disgust. His blue eyes even seemed to praise them as they went.

"Those men are more human than I," he slowly said. "Why should I condemn them?"

And, as if under the influence of a spell, Julian found himself thinking of the wandering ruffians as fine fellows, full of warmth of heart and generous feeling. A boy and girl went by. Neither could have been more than sixteen years old. They paused by a lamp-post, and the girl openly kissed the boy. He sturdily endured the compliment, staring firmly at her pale cheeks and tired eyes. Then the girl walked away, and he stood alone till she was out of sight. Eventually he walked off slowly, singing a plantation song: "I want you, my honey; yes, I do!" Valentine and Julian had watched and listened, and now Valentine, moving round on the window-ledge till he faced Julian, said:

"That is it, Julian, put in the straightforward music-hall way. People are happy because they want things; yes, they do. It is a philosophy of life. That boy has a life because he wants that girl, and she wants him. And you, Julian, you want a thousand things—"

"Not since I have known you," Julian said.

He felt curiously excited and troubled. His arm was still linked in Valentine's. Slowly he withdrew it. Valentine shut down the window and they came back to the fire.

"You know," Valentine said, "that it is possible for two influences to work one upon the other, and for each to convert the other. I begin to think that your nature has triumphed over mine."

"What?" Julian said, in frank amazement. The Philistines could not have been more astounded when Samson pulled down the pillars.

"I have taught you, as you say, to die to the ordinary man's life, Julian. But what if you have taught me to live to it?"

Julian did not answer for a moment. He was wondering whether Valentine could possibly be serious. But his face was serious, even eager. There was an unwonted stain of red on his smooth, usually pale cheeks. A certain wild boyishness had stolen over him, a reckless devil danced in his blue eyes. Julian caught the infection of his mood.

"And what's my lesson?" Julian said.

His voice sounded thick and harsh. There was a surge of blood through his brain and a prickly heat behind his eyeballs. Suddenly a notion took him that Valentine had never been so magnificent as now,—now when a new fierceness glittered in his expression, and a wild wave of humanity ran through him like a surging tide.

"What's my lesson, Valentine?"

"I will show you, this spring. But it is the lesson the spring teaches, the lesson of fulfilling your nature, of waking from your slumbers, of finding the air, of giving yourself to the rifling fingers of the sun, of yielding all your scent to others, and of taking all their scent to you. That's the lesson of your strength, Julian, and of all the strength of the spring. Lie out in the showers, and let the clouds cover you with shadows, and listen to the song of every bird, and—and—ah!" he suddenly broke off in a burst of laughter, "I am rhapsodizing. The spring has got into my veins even among these chimneypots of London. The spring is in me, and, who knows? your soul, Julian. For don't you feel wild blood in your veins sometimes?"

"Yes, yes."

"And humming passions that come to you and lift you from your feet?"

"You know I do."

"But I never knew before that they might lift you towards heaven. That's the thing. I have thought that the exercise of the passions dragged a man down; but why should it be so? I have talked of men wallowing in the mire. I must find out whether I have been lying when I said that. Julian, this spring, you and I will see the world, at any rate, with open eyes. We will watch the budding and blossoming of the souls around us, the flowers in the garden of life. We will not be indifferent or afraid. I have been a coward in my ice prison of refinement. I keep a perpetual season of winter round me. I know it. I know it to-night."

Julian did not speak. He was carried away by this outburst, which gained so much, and so strange, force by its issue from the lips and from the heart of Valentine. But he was carried away as a weak swimmer by a resistless torrent, and instinctively he seemed to be aware of danger and to be stretching out his arms for some rock or tree-branch to stay his present course. Perhaps Valentine noticed this, for his excitement suddenly faded, and his face resumed its usual expression of almost cold purity and refinement.

"I generally translate this sort of thing into music," he said.

At the last word Julian looked up instinctively to the wall on which the picture of "The Merciful Knight" usually hung. For Valentine's music was inseparably connected in his mind with that picture. His eyes fell on a gap.

"Val," he exclaimed, in astonishment, "what's become of—"

"Oh, 'The Merciful Knight'? It has gone to be cleaned."

"Why? It was all right, surely?"

"No. I found it wanted cleaning badly and I am having it reframed. It will be away for some time."

"You must miss it."

"Yes, very much."

The last words were spoken with cutting indifference.



CHAPTER VII

JULIAN VISITS THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

From that night, and almost imperceptibly, the relations existing between Valentine and Julian slightly changed. It seemed to Julian as if a door previously shut in his friend's soul opened and as if he entered into this hitherto secret chamber. He found there an apparent strange humanity which, as he grew accustomed to it, warmed him. The curious refined saintliness of Valentine, almost chilly in its elevation, thawed gently as the days went by, but so gently that Julian scarcely knew it, could scarcely define the difference which nevertheless led him to alter his conduct almost unconsciously. One great sameness, perhaps, gave him a sensation of safety and of continuity. Valentine's face still kept its almost unearthly expression of intellectuality and of purity. When Julian looked at him no passions flamed in his blue eyes, no lust ever crawled in the lines about his mouth. His smooth cheeks never flushed with beaconing desire, nor was his white forehead pencilled with the shadowy writing that is a pale warning to the libertine. And yet his speech about the spring that night, as they leaned out over Victoria Street, had evidently not been a mere reckless rhapsody. It had held a meaning and was remembered. In Valentine there seemed to be flowering a number of faint-hued wants, such wants as had never flowered from his nature before. The fig-tree that had seemed so exquisitely barren began to put forth leaves, and when the warm showers sang to it, it sang in tremulous reply.

And the spring grew in London.

Never before had Julian been so conscious of the growth of the year as now. The spring stirred inside him, as if he were indeed the Mother Earth. Tumults of nature shook him. With the bursting of the crocus, the pointing of its spear of gold to the sun, a life gathered itself together within him, a life that held, too, a golden shaft within its colour-stained cup. And the bland scent of the innumerable troops of hyacinths in Hyde Park was a language to him as he strolled in the sun towards the Row. Scents speak to the young of the future as they speak to the old of the past; to the one with an indefinite excitement, to the other with a vague regret. And especially when he was in the company of Valentine did Julian become intensely alive to the march of the earth towards summer, and feel that he was in step with it, dragooned by the same music. He began to learn, so he believed, what Valentine had called the lesson of his strength, and of all the strength of the spring. His wild blood leaped in his veins, and the world was walking with him to a large prospect, as yet fancifully tricked out in mists and crowned with clouds.

The spring brought to Valentine an abounding health such as he had never known before, a physical glory which, without actually changing him, gave to him a certain novelty of aspect which Julian felt without actually seeing. One day, when they were out riding together in the Park, he said:

"How extraordinarily strong you look to-day, Val."

Valentine spurred his horse into a short gallop.

"I feel robust," he said. "I think it is my mind working on my body. I have attained to a more healthy outlook on things, to a saner conception of life. For years you have been learning from me, Julian. Now I think the positions are reversed. I am learning from you."

Julian pressed his knees against his horse's sides with an iron grip, feeling the spirited animal's spirited life between them. They were now on a level with the Serpentine and riding parallel to it. A few vigorous and determined bathers swam gaily in the pale warmth of the morning sun. Two boys raced along the grassy bank to dry themselves, whooping with exultation, and leaping as they ran. A man in a broad boat, ready to save life, exchanged loud jokes with the swimmers. On a seat two filthy loafers watched the scene with vacant eyes. They had slept in the Park all night, and their ragged clothes were drenched with dew.

"I could race with those boys," Valentine said. "But not so long ago I was like the men on the bench. I only cared to look on at the bathing of others. Now I could swim myself."

He sent his horse along at a tremendous pace for a moment, then drew him in, and turned towards Julian.

"We are learning the lesson of the spring," he said.

As he spoke a light from some hidden place shot for an instant into his eyes and faded again. Julian laughed gaily. The ride spurred his spirits. He was conscious of the recklessness created in a man by exercise.

"I could believe that you were actually growing, Val," he said, "growing before my eyes. Only you're much too old."

"Yes; I am too old for that," Valentine said.

A sudden weariness ran in the words, a sudden sound of age.

"The truth is," he added, but with more life, "my nature is expanding inside my body, and you feel it and fancy you can see the envelope echo the words of the letter it holds. You are clever enough to be fanciful. Gently, Raindrop, gently!"

He quieted the mare as they turned into the road. Just as they were passing under the arch into the open space at Hyde Park corner a woman shot across in front of them. They nearly rode over her, and she uttered a little yell as she awkwardly gained the pavement. Her head was crowned with a perfect pyramid of ostrich feathers, and as she turned to bestow upon the riders the contemptuous glance of a cockney pedestrian, who demands possession of all London as a sacred right, Julian suddenly pulled up his horse.

"Hulloh!" he said to the woman.

"What is it?" asked Valentine, who was in front.

"Wait a second, Val. I want a word with this lady."

"Rather compromising," Valentine said, laughing, as his eyes took in with a swift glance the woman's situation in the economy of the town.

The woman now slowly advanced to the railing, apparently flattered at being thus hailed from horseback. Her kinsmen doubtless always walked.

"Don't you remember me?" Julian said.

She was in fact the lady of the feathers, with whom he had foregathered at the coffee-stall in Piccadilly. The lady leaned her plush arms upon the rail and surveyed him with her tinted eyes.

"Can't say as I do, my dear," she remarked. "What name?"

"Never mind that. But tell me, have you ever had a cup of coffee and a bun in Piccadilly early in the morning?"

The mention of the bun struck home to the lady, swept the quivering chords of her memory into a tune. She pushed her face nearer to Julian and stared at him hard.

"So it is," she said. "So it is."

For a moment she seemed inclined to retreat. Then she stood her ground. Her nerves, perhaps, had grown stronger.

"I should like to know you," Julian said.

The lady was obviously gratified. She tossed her head and giggled.

"Where do you live?" Julian continued.

The lady dived into the back part of her skirt, and, after a long and passionate pursuit, ran a small purse to earth. Opening it with deliberation, she extracted a good-sized card, and handed it up to Julian.

"There you are, dearie," she said.

On the card was printed, "Cuckoo Bright, 400 Marylebone Road."

"I will come at five this afternoon and take you out to tea," said Julian.

"Right you are, Bertie," the lady cried, in a voice thrilling with pride and exultation.

Julian rode off, and she watched him go, preening herself against the rail like some gaudy bird. She looked up at a policeman and laughed knowingly.

"Well, copper," she said; "how's that, eh?"

The policeman was equal to the occasion.

"Not out," he answered, with a stiff and semi-official smile. "Move along."

And Cuckoo Bright moved as one who walked on air.

Julian had joined Valentine, who had observed the colloquy from afar, controlling with some difficulty the impatience of his mare, excited by her gallop.

"You know that lady?" he asked, still laughing, with perhaps a touch of contempt.

"Very platonically. We met at a coffee-stall in Piccadilly as I was going home after your trance. She was with me when I saw that strange flame."

"When you imagined you saw it."

"If you prefer it, Val. I am going to see her this afternoon."

"My dear fellow—why?"

"I'll tell you," Julian answered gravely. "I believe she is the woman who went to the 'European' with Marr, who must have been with Marr when he was taken ill, and who fled. I have a reason for thinking so."

"What is it?"

"I'll tell you later, when I have talked to her."

"Surely you don't suspect the poor creature of foul play?"

"Not I. It's sheer curiosity that takes me to her."

"Oh."

They rode on a step or two. Then Valentine said:

"Are you going to take her out? She's—well, she is a trifle unmistakable, Julian."

"Yes, I know. You are right. She's not for afternoon wear, poor soul. What damned scoundrels men are."

Valentine did not join in the sentiment thus forcibly expressed.

Between four and five that afternoon Julian hailed a cab and drove to Marylebone Road. The houses in it seemed endless, and dreary alike, but at length the cab drew up at number 400, tall, gaunt and haggard, like the rest. Julian rang the bell, and immediately a shrill dog barked with a piping fury within the house. Then the door was opened by an old woman, whose arid face was cabalistic, and who looked as if she spent her existence in expecting a raid from the police.

"Is Miss Cuckoo Bright at home?"

"Miss Bright! I'll see."

The old dame turned tail, and slithered, flat-footed, to a room opening from the dirty passage. She vanished and Julian heard two gentle voices muttering. The old woman returned.

"This way, sir!" she said, in a voice that perpetually struggled to get the whip-hand of an obvious bronchitis.

A moment more and Julian stood in the acute presence of the lady of the feathers. At first he scarcely recognized her, for she had discarded her crown of glory and now faced him in the strange frivolity of her hatless touzled hair. She stood by the square table covered with a green cloth, that occupied the centre of the small room, which communicated by folding doors with an inner chamber. A pastile was burning drowsily in a corner, and the shrill dog piped seditiously from its station on a black horsehair-covered sofa, over which a woolwork rug was thrown in easy abandon. Julian extended his hand.

"How d'you do?" he said.

"Pretty bobbish, my dear," was the reply; but the voice was much less pert than he remembered it, and looking at his hostess, Julian perceived that she was considerably younger than he had imagined, and that she was actually—amazing luxury!—a little shy. She had a box of safety-matches in her hand, and she now struck one, and applied it to a gas-burner. The day was dark.

"Pleased to see you," she added, with an attempt at a hearty and untutored air. "Jessie, shut up."

Jessie, the dog, of the toy species, and arched into the shape of a note of interrogation, obeyed, lay down and trembled into sleep. The gaslight revealed the details of the sordid room, a satin box of sweetmeats on the table, a penny bunch of sweet violets in a specimen-glass, one or two yellow-backed novels, and a few photographs ranged upon the imitation marble mantelpiece. There was one arm-chair, whose torn lining indecently revealed the interior stuffing, and there were three other chairs with wooden backs. The lady of the feathers did not dwell in marble halls, unless, perhaps, imaginatively.