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Flames
by Robert Smythe Hichens
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"Oh," said Cuckoo.

She had nothing more to say. She could have said nothing more. The stress of her excitement was too great.

"Look at that holly tree. What a quantity of berries it has!" the doctor said. "That's because it is a hard winter. Miss Bright, you are right in you conviction. Valentine Cresswell is—has been—totally evil, and is deliberately, coldly, but with determination, compassing the utter ruin of the man who trusts him and believes in him—of Addison."

Cuckoo nodded again, this time with a strangely matter-of-course air, which assured the doctor in a flash of the long certainty of her knowledge of Valentine.

"Such a thing seemed to me entirely incredible," the doctor pursued. "I am forced—forced—to believe it is true. But remember this: I have known Mr. Cresswell for several years intimately. I have been again and again with him and Julian. I have noticed the extraordinary influence he had over Julian, and I know that influence used to be a noble influence, used solely for good. Mr. Cresswell was a man of extraordinary high-mindedness and purity of life. He had a brilliant intellect," the doctor continued, forgetting to whom he was talking, as his mind went back to the Valentine of the old days. "But, far more than that, he was born with a very wonderful and unusual nature. It was written in his face in the grandeur—I can call it nothing else—of his expression. And it was written in his life, in all his acts. But, most of all it was written in all he did for Julian. Ah, you look surprised!"

Indeed Cuckoo's face, such of it as was visible under the black shadow of the veil, was a mask of blank wonderment. She looked upon the doctor as all that was clever and perfect and extraordinary; so this, it seemed to her, idiocy of his outlook upon Valentine was too much for her manner.

"Well, I never! Him!" she could not help ejaculating with a long breath, that was almost like a little puff.

"Remember," said Dr. Levillier, "this was before you knew him."

He had taken the trouble to ascertain from Julian the exact date of Valentine's first introduction to the lady of the feathers.

"Oh yes," said Cuckoo, still with absolute incredulity of the truth of the doctor's panegyric expressed in voice and look.

"Men change greatly, terribly."

"Oh, not like that," she jerked out suddenly, moved by an irresistible impulse to contradict his apparent deduction.

"No, there you are right," he answered with emphasis. "Sane men do not, can never, I believe, change so utterly."

"That's what I say. I've seen men go down, lots of 'em, but it ain't like that."

Cuckoo spoke with some authority, as of one speaking from depths of a deep experience. She put her hands under the warm rug with a sensation of something that was like dignity of mind. She and the doctor were talking on equal terms of intellectuality just at this moment. She was saying sensible things and he was obliged to agree with her.

"Not like that," she murmured again out of the embrace of the rug.

He turned towards her so that he could see her more distinctly and make his words more impressive.

"Remember now that what I am going to say to you must not be mentioned to Julian on any account, or to any one," he said.

"I'll remember. Honour. I'll never tell."

"I have a very sad theory to explain this great change in Mr. Cresswell, from what he was as I knew him, and you must take his beauty of character from me—to what he is as you and I know him now. I believe that he has become mad." For the doctor had resolutely put away from his mind the fancies called up in it by the visit of Marr's wife.

Cuckoo gave a little cry of surprise, then hastily glanced at the coachman's back and pushed her hands under the rug up towards her mouth.

"Hush," said the doctor. "Only listen quietly."

"Yes, pardon," she said. "But he ain't—oh, he can't be."

"I am forced to think it, forced to think it," the doctor said, with pressure. "He has, in great measure, one of the most common, most universal, of the fatuous beliefs of the insane,—a deep-rooted, an almost incredible belief in himself, in his own glory, power, will, personality."

Cuckoo tried to throw in some remark here, but he went on without a pause:

"There are madmen confined in asylums all over England who think themselves the Messiah—this is the commonest form of religious mania—emperors, kings, regenerators of the human race, doers of great deeds that must bring them everlasting fame. On all other points they are sane, and you might spend hours alone with them and never discover the one crank in their mind that makes the whole mind out of joint. So you have been alone with Mr. Cresswell and have not suspected him. Yet he has a madness, and it is this madness which leads him to this frightful conduct of his towards Julian, conduct which you will never know the extent of."

Here Cuckoo succeeded in getting in a remark:

"Will," she said, catching hold of that one word and beginning to look eager. "That's what he was at all the time he was talking to me that night. Will, he says, is this and that and the other; will, he says, is everythin', I remember. Will, he says, is my God, or somethin' like it. He did. He did."

"Ah! you see; even you have noticed it."

"Yes; but he ain't mad, though," Cuckoo concluded, with an echo of that obstinacy which she could never completely conquer. She said what she felt. She could not help it. The doctor was in no wise offended by this unskilled opinion opposed to his skilled one. He even smiled slightly.

"Why do you say that?" he asked.

"He's too sharp. He's a sight too sharp."

"Madmen are very cunning."

"So are women," Cuckoo exclaimed. "I could see if a man was mad."

She was a little intoxicated with the swift motion, the bright sun, the keen air, the clang of the horse's hoofs on the hard roads, and, most of all, with this conference which the befurred coachman was on no account to hear. This made her hold fast to her opinion, with no thought of being rude or presuming. The doctor, accustomed to have duchesses and others hanging upon his words of wisdom, was whipped into a refreshed humour by this odd attitude of an ignorant girl, and he replied with extreme vivacity:

"You will think as I do one day. Meanwhile listen to me. When Mr. Cresswell came to you and broke out into this tirade, which you say you remember, on the subject of will, did he not show any excitement?"

"Eh?"

"Did he get excited, very hot and eager? Did he speak unusually loud, or make any curious gestures with his hands? Did he do anything, that you can remember, such as an ordinary man would not do?"

"Why, yes," Cuckoo answered. "So he did."

"Ah! What was it? What did he do?"

"Well, after he'd been talkin' a bit he caught hold of me and pulled me in front of the glass. See?"

"Yes, yes."

"And he made me look into it."

"What for?"

But at this point Cuckoo got restive.

"I—I can't remember," she murmured, almost sullenly, recalling Valentine's bitter sarcasms on her appearance and way of life.

"Never mind, then. Leave that. But after; what came next?"

"While we was standin' like that he seemed to get frightened or somethin', like he saw somethin' in the glass. He was frightened, scared, and he hit out all on a sudden, just where my face was in the glass, and smashed it."

"Smashed the glass?"

"Yes. And then he snatched hold of me and looked in my eyes awful queer, and then he burst out laughin' and says as the mirror was tellin' him lies. That's all."

"He was perfectly sober?"

"Oh, he hadn't been on the booze."

"Sober and did that, and then you can tell me that there is no madness in him."

The doctor spoke almost in a bantering tone, but Cuckoo stuck to her guns.

"I don't think it," she said, with her under lip sticking out.

"Well, Miss Bright, I want you to assume something."

"What's that?"

"To pretend to yourself that you think something, whether you do really think it or not."

"Make believe!" cried Cuckoo, childishly.

"Exactly."

"What about?"

"I want you to 'make believe' that Mr. Cresswell is not himself—is not sane."

"O-oh-h!" said Cuckoo, with a long intonation of surprise.

"I do honestly believe it; you are to pretend to believe it. Now, remember that."

"All right."

"You are not to contradict any more, you see."

"Oh," began Cuckoo, in sudden distress. "Pardon. I didn't—"

"Hush! That's all right. Act with me on the make-believe or assumption that Mr. Cresswell is not himself at present."

"Ah, but that ain't no make-believe. He told me as he wasn't himself when he says, 'I am Marr.'"

"Yes—yes," said the doctor. Secretly, almost angrily, he said to himself that Valentine, in some access of insanity, had actually confessed to the lady of the feathers that he knew himself to be mad.

"He says he ain't himself," she repeated again, with an eager feeling that perhaps, at last, she had got at the right interpretation of the gospel of Valentine.

"That is practically the same thing as his saying to you that he was mad. Now you have told me what you feel for Julian."

Cuckoo flushed, and muttered something unintelligible, twining her hands in the sables till she nearly pulled them from Doctor Levillier's knees.

"And you have seen the terrible change that has come over him, and that is fast, fast deepening to something that must end in utter ruin. You have not seen him these last few days, I think."

"No", said Cuckoo, her eyes fixed hungrily on the doctor's face. She began to tug at her veil. "What's it? Is he—is he?"

She collapsed into a nervous silence, still tugging with a futile hand at the veil, which remained implacably stretched across her face. The doctor looked at her, and said steadily:

"He has gone a little further—down. You understand me?"

"I ought to," she said, bitterly.

"As you are mounting upward," the doctor rejoined, with a kind and firm gravity that seemed indeed to lift Cuckoo, as a sweet wind lifts a feather and sends it on high.

The bitterness went out of her face, but she said nothing, only sat listening attentively while the doctor went on:

"My belief is this, and if you hold it you can perhaps act in this matter with more boldness, more fearlessness, than if you do not hold it. I believe that Mr. Cresswell, who played very foolish tricks with his nerves some time ago, just before he got to know you, has become mad to this extent, that he believes himself to have a power of will unlike that possessed by any other man,—an inhuman power, in fact. He fancies that he has the will of a sort of god, and he wishes to prove this to himself more especially. Everything is for self in a madman. Now he looks about for a means of proving that his will can do everything. He wants to make it do something extraordinary, uncommon. What does he find for it to do? This, the ruin of Julian. And now I'll tell you why this ruin of Julian would be a peculiar triumph for his will. Originally, when Cresswell was sane and splendid, his splendour of sanity guarded Julian from all that was dangerous. Julian was naturally inclined to be wild. He has an ardent nature, and five years ago, when he was a mere boy, might have fallen into a thousand follies. Cresswell's influence first kept him from these follies, and at last taught him to loathe and despise them. And Julian, remember this, told Cresswell at last that he had been to him a sort of saviour. You can follow me?"

"'M," Cuckoo ejaculated with shut mouth and a nod of her head.

"So that Cresswell knew what his will had been able to do in the direction of lifting Julian high up, almost above his nature. Well, then followed certain foolish practices which I need not describe. Cresswell and Julian joined in a certain trickery, often practised by people who call themselves spiritualists and occultists. It certainly had an effect upon them at the time, and I advised them earnestly to drop it. They disregarded my advice, and the result was that Mr. Cresswell fell into an extraordinary condition of body. He fell into a trance, became as if he were dead, and remained so for some hours on a certain night. I was called in to him, and actually thought that he was dead. But he revived. Now, I believe that though he seemed to recover, and did recover in body, he never recovered from that insensibility in mind. I believe he went into that sleep sane and came out of it mad, and that he remains mad to this moment. Certainly, ever since then he has been an altered man, the man you know, not at all the man he used to be. Since that night he, who used to be almost unconscious of the wonder of his own will, has become intensely self-conscious, and engrossed with it, and has wished to make it obey him and perform miracles. And what is the special miracle to which he is devoting himself at this moment, as you have observed? Just this: the ruin of the thing he originally saved. It is like this," he said, noting that Cuckoo was becoming puzzled and confused, "Cresswell, by his influence, made Julian loathe sin. Coming out of this trance, as I believe, a madman, he seeks to make his will do something extraordinary. What shall he make it do? His eyes fall on Julian, who is always with him, as you know. And he resolves to make Julian love what he has taught him to loathe—sin, vice, degradation of every kind. So he sets to work with all the cunning of a diseased mind, and hour by hour, day by day, he works for this horrible end. At first he is quiet and careful. But at last he becomes almost intoxicated as he sees his own success. And he allows himself to be led into outbreaks of triumph. One of those outbreaks you yourself seem to have witnessed. I have witnessed another—on the night I dined alone with Cresswell, when he killed the dog, Rip, and threw him out into the snow. Cresswell is intoxicated with the mental intoxication of mania, at the degradation into which his will has forced Julian, who had learnt to love him, to think that everything he did must be right. And this intoxication is leading him to excesses. It is my firm belief that he intends to drag Julian down into intolerable abysses of sin, to plunge him into utter ruin, to bring him perhaps to prison, and to death."

Cuckoo was listening now with a white face—even her lips looked almost grey. The sunshine still lay over the winter world. The horses trotted. The sables were warm about her. They had nearly left the city behind them and were gaining the heights, on which the air was keener and more life-giving, and from which the outlook was larger and more inspiring. But the girl's gaiety and almost wild sense of vivacity and protectedness had vanished. For the doctor's face and voice had become grave, and his words were weighty with a conviction, which, added to her own knowledge of Julian and Valentine, made her fears unutterable. As the doctor paused she opened her lips as if to speak, but she said nothing. He could not but perceive the cloud that had settled on her, and his manner quickly changed. A brightness, a hopefulness, illumined his face, and he said quickly:

"This tragedy is what you and I, but you especially, must prevent."

Then Cuckoo spoke at last:

"How ever?" she said.

"Remember this," he answered. "If Cresswell is mad we must pity him, not condemn him. But we must, above all, fight him. Could I prove his madness the danger would be averted? Possibly time will give me the means of proving it. I have watched him. I shall continue to watch him. But as yet, although I see enough to convince me of his insanity, I don't see enough to convince the world, or, above all, to convince Julian. Therefore never give Julian the slightest hint of what I have told you of to-day. His adoration of Valentine is such that even a hint might easily lead him to regard both you and me as his enemies. Keep your own counsel and mine, but act with me on the silent assumption that Cresswell being a madman, we are justified in fighting him to the bitter end, you and I, with all our forces."

"I see," Cuckoo said, a burning excitement beginning to wake in her.

"Justified in fighting him, but not in hating him."

"Oh," she said, with a much more doubtful accent.

"Scarcely any human being, if indeed any, is completely hateful. How then can a human being, whose mind is ill and out of control, be hateful?" said the doctor, gently.

She felt herself rebuked, and a quick thought of herself, of what she was, rebuked her too.

"I'll try not," she murmured, but with no inward conviction of success.

They were on the heath now, and the smoke of London hung in the wintry air beyond and below them. The sun was already beginning to wear the aspect of a traveller on the point of departure for a journey. His once golden face was sinister with that blood-red hue which it so often assumes on winter afternoons, and which seems to set it in a place more than usually remote, more than usually distant from our world, and in a clime that is sad and strange. Winds danced over the heath like young witches. The horses, whipped by the more intense cold, pulled hard against the bit, and made the coachman's arms ache. The doctor looked away for a moment at the vapours that began to clothe the afternoon in the hollows and depressions of the landscape, and at the sun, whose gathering change of aspect smote on his imagination as something akin to the change that falls over the faces of men towards that hour when the sun of their glory makes ready for its setting. Still keeping his glance on that sad red sun in its nest of radiating vapours, he said, in a withdrawn voice:

"We must hate nothing except the hatefulness of sin in ourselves and in others."

Cuckoo listened as to the voice of some one on a throne, and tears that she could not fully understand rose in her eyes.

But now the doctor turned from the sun to the lady of the feathers, and there was a bright light in his quiet eyes.

"You and I must fight with all our forces," he said. "Have you ever thought about this thing will which Cresswell worships insanely? Have you ever felt it in you, Miss Bright?"

"I don't know as I have," Cuckoo said, secretly wondering if it were that strange and fleeting power which had come to her of late, which had made her for a moment fearless of Valentine as she defied him in the loneliness of her room, which had stirred her even to a faith in herself when she spoke with the doctor under the stars upon her doorstep.

"I think you have. I think you will. It must be there, for Julian feels it in you. He—he calls it a flame."

"Eh? A flame?"

"Yes. He sees it in your eyes, and it holds him near you."

So the doctor spoke, partly out of his conviction, partly because he had definitely resolved to put away from him all the things that fought against his reason and that his imagination perhaps loved too much. Such things, he thought, floated like clouds across the clearness of his vision, and drowned the light of his power to do good. So his fancies that had fastened on the mystery of the dead Marr and the living Valentine, connecting them together, and weaving a veil of magic about their strange connection, were banished. He would not hold more commerce with them, nor would he accept the fancies of others as realities. Thus, in his mind, Julian's legend of the flame in this girl's eyes, despite the doctor's own vision of flames, became merely a story of the truth of human will and an acknowledgment of its power.

"Is that why he looks at me so?" Cuckoo asked, in a manner unusually meditative. "But then he, Valentine, did the same! Why, could that be what scared him that night—what he struck at?"

"He too may feel that you have a power for good, to fight against his power for evil. Yes, he does feel it. Make him feel it more. Rely on yourself. Trust that there's something great within you, something placed there for you to use. Never mind what your life has been. Never mind your own weakness. You are the home, the temple, of this power of will. Julian feels it, and it draws him to you, but it is as nothing yet compared with the power of Cresswell. You have to make it more powerful, so that you may win Julian back from this danger."

"Eh? How?"

"Rest on it; trust in it; teach it to act. Show Julian more and more that you have it. Can't you think of a way of showing that you have this power?"

"Not I. No," Cuckoo murmured.

The doctor lowered his voice still more. Quite at a venture he drew a bow, and with his first arrow smote the lady of the feathers to the heart.

"Has Julian ever asked you to do anything?" he said.

Suddenly Cuckoo's face was scarlet.

"Why? How d' you know?" she stammered.

"Anything for him that was not evil?" the doctor pursued, following out an abstract theory, not as Cuckoo fancied, dealing with known facts. "I know nothing. I only ask you to try and remember, to search your mind."

There was no need for the lady of the feathers to do that.

"Yes, he did once," she said, looking still confused and furtive.

"Was it difficult?"

She hesitated.

"I s'pose so," she answered at last.

"Did you do it?"

"No."

The doctor had noticed that his questions gave pain.

"I don't want to know what it was and I don't ask," he said. "I have neither the right to, nor the desire to. But can't you do it, and show Julian that you have done it? If you do I think he will see that flame, which he fears and which fascinates him, burn more clearly, more steadily, in your eyes."

"I'll see," Cuckoo said with a kind of gulp.

"Do more than this. This is only a part, one weapon in the fight. Cresswell is always near Julian; you must be near him. Cresswell pursues Julian; you must pursue him, use your woman's wit, use all your experience of men; use your heart. Wake up and throw yourself into this battle, and make yourself worthy of fighting. Only you can tell how. But this is a fact. Our wills, our powers of doing things, are made strong, or made weak by our own lives. Each time we do a degradingly low, beastly thing"—he chose the words most easily comprehended by such a woman as she was—"we weaken our will, and make it less able to do anything good for another. If you commit loveless actions from to-day—though Julian has nothing to do with them—with each loveless action you will lose a point in the battle against the madness of Cresswell. And you must lose no points. Remember you are fighting a madman, as I believe, for the safety of the man you love. If I could tell you what—"

The doctor pulled himself up short.

"No," he said, "no need to tell you more than that, within these last few days I have found that all you said about Cresswell's present diablerie"—he shook his head impatiently at the language he was using to the lady of the feathers—"Cresswell's present impulse for evil is less horribly true than the truth. I shall watch him, day by day, from now. And if I can act, I shall do so. If his insanity is too sharp for me, as it may well be, I shall be checkmated in any effort to forcibly keep him from doing harm. In that case I can only trust to you, and hope that some chance circumstance may lead to the opening of Julian's eyes. But they are closed—closed fast. In any case you will help me and I will help you. You shall have opportunities of meeting Julian often. I will arrange that. And Cresswell—"

He paused as if in deep thought.

"How to do it," he murmured, almost to himself. "How to bring this battle to the issue!"

Then he turned his eyes on Cuckoo.

She was sitting bolt upright in the carriage. Her cheeks were flushed. Her hollow eyes were sparkling. She had drawn her hands out from under the rug and clasped them together in her lap.

"Oh, I'll do anything I can," she said, "anything. And—and I can do that one thing!"

"Yes," said the doctor. "Which?"

"The thing that he asked me once, and what I said no to," she answered, but in such a low murmur that the doctor scarcely caught the words.

He leaned forward in the carriage.

"Home now, Grant," he said to the coachman. "Or—no—drive first to 400 Marylebone Road."

The doctor turned again towards Cuckoo. She was looking away from him, so much that he was obliged to believe that she wished to conceal her face, which was towards the sunset.

The sky over London glowed with a dull red like a furnace. It deepened, while they looked, passing rapidly through the biting cold of the late winter afternoon.

The red cloud near the fainting sun broke and parted.

Spears of gold were thrust forth.

"Flames," the doctor whispered to himself. "Flames! The will, the soul of God in nature."



PART V—FLAMES



CHAPTER I

VALENTINE INVITES HIS GUESTS

Valentine and Julian sat together in the tentroom at night, as they sat together many months ago, when Julian confessed his secret and Valentine expressed his strange desire to have a different soul. Now it was deep winter. The year was old. In three days it must die. It lay in the snow, like some abandoned beggar waiting for the inevitable end. Some, who were happy, would fain have succoured it and kept it with them. Others, who were sad, said: "Let it go—this beggar. Already it has taken too many alms from us." But neither the happy nor the sad could affect its fate. So it lay in the snow and in the wind, upon its deathbed.

The tentroom had not been altered. Still the green draperies, veiled walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling. The fire danced and shone. The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness. Only Rip was gone from the broad and cushioned divan upon which he had loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and Julian listened or replied. The room was the same, and this very fact emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it. They leaned in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to time in cigarette-smoke. No sound of London reached them in this small room. Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain. Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul. The face of Julian was drawn and heavy. His eyes were downcast. His arms hung over the cushioned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued. From time to time he opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if he ground them together. The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth. The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the steps of evening on an autumn day—grey, as if it clothed processes of decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the creaking threshold of premature age.

The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye. There was still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in his features. The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were the lips of Julian. The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease. Yet he, too, was changed. Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, asserted itself. It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pass in a fleeting gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed immobility of a mask. Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness. Valentine's was a hard and shameless face, although his features, if coarser than of old, were still noble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.

He was looking across at Julian, who held idly between his lax fingers a letter written with violet ink upon pink paper, which had a little bird stamped in the left-hand corner.

"When did you get it?" he said.

"Two or three days ago, I think. I can't remember. I can't remember anything now," Julian answered heavily.

"And you have had two since?"

"Yes. And to-day she called."

"You were out?"

"Yes."

"She shows herself very exigent all of a sudden. She is afraid of losing you. I told you long ago she cherished absurd ambitions with regard to you. Do you intend to answer her notes?"

"Oh yes," Julian said. "Cuckoo has always been very fond of me; very fond."

He glanced at the absurdly vulgar little bird in the corner of the letter. "And that's something," he added slowly.

"You are weighed down with gratitude? No wonder. Are you grateful to others who have always cared for you in a different way—unselfishly, that is?"

"I don't seem to feel very much about anybody now," Julian said. "I do such a lot. The more you do, the less you feel. Damnable life! All cruelty. I can't feel satisfied. But there must be something; something I haven't tried. I must find it," he said, almost fiercely, and, stirring in a sudden energy, "I must find it—or—curse you, Val, why don't you find it for me?"

Valentine laughed.

"The last novelty has failed? You are a very discontented sinner, Julian. And yet London begins to think you too enterprising. I hear that Lady Crichton is the last person to shut her doors against you. What did she hear of?"

"How should I know?"

He laughed bitterly.

"She oughtn't to be particular. She used to receive Marr. I met him first in her yellow drawing-room."

"London had not discussed him, perhaps. You are rapidly becoming a legend and a warning. That is fame. To be the accepted warning for others."

"Or infamy; which is much the same thing."

"But you are only at the first posting-station of your journey," Valentine continued, looking at him with a smile. "If you are dissatisfied, it is because you have not tasted yet half that strength of the spring we once talked of. You have not completely thrown off the foolish yoke of public opinion. The chains still jangle about you. Cast them away and you will yet be happy."

"Shall I? Shall I, Valentine?"

The exhausted, worn, and weary figure leaned abruptly forward in its chair. Julian's tired eyes glittered greedily.

"To be happy, I'd commit any crime," he said.

"Crime is merely opinion," Valentine answered. "Everything is opinion. You will commit crimes probably. Most brave men do."

"But shall I be happy?"

"You are greedy, Julian, greedy of everything, knowledge of life, lust, joy. You are never satisfied. That's because you and I fasted for so long; and the greedy man is never quite happy while he is eating, for he is always anticipating the next course. And, let philosophers say what they will, happiness does not lie in anticipation. Go on eating. Pass on from course to course. At last there will come a time, a beautiful time, when your appetite will be satisfied and you will rest contented. But, remember, not till you have journeyed through the whole menu, played with your dessert and even drunk your black coffee. Go on, only go on. Men and women are unhappy. They think it is because they have done too much. They reproach themselves for a thousand things that they have done. Fools! They are unhappy because they have not done enough. The text which will haunt me on my deathbed will be: 'I have left undone those things which I ought to have done.' Yes, during my long cursed years of inaction, when I was called the Saint of Victoria Street. Ah! Julian, you and I slept; we are awake now. You and I were dead; we are now alive. But we are only at the beginning of our lives. We have those years, those white and empty years, to drown in the waters of Lethe. They are like monstrous children that should have been strangled almost ere they were born, white, vacant children. And now, day by day, we are pressing them down in the waters with our hands. At last they will sink. The waves will flow over their haggard faces. The waves will sweep them away. Then we shall be happy. We shall redeem those years on which the locust fed, and we shall be happy."

"Yes, by God, we shall be happy, we will—we will be happy. Only teach me to be happy, Valentine, anywhere, anyhow."

"Not with the lady of the feathers. She will not make you happy."

"Cuckoo? No! For she's terribly unhappy herself. Poor old Cuckoo. I wonder what she's doing now."

"Searching in the snow for her fate," Valentine said, with a sneer.

* * * * *

It was not so. Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible. And the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows and night-fellows.

* * * * *

"I am going to write to Cuckoo," Julian said a day later. "What shall I say?"

Valentine hesitated.

"What have you thought of saying?" he asked.

"Oh, I don't know. First one thing, then another. Good-bye among the number. That's what you wish me to say, Val, isn't it?"

He spoke in a listless voice, monotonous in inflection and lifeless in timbre. The dominion of Valentine over him since the supper at the Savoy had increased, consolidating itself into an undoubted tyranny, which Julian accepted, carelessly, thoughtlessly, a prey to the internal degradation of his mind. Once he had only been nobly susceptible, a fine power. Now he was drearily weak, an ungracious disability. But with his weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the indifference peculiar to the autocrat. Valentine recognized in the voice the badge of serfdom, even more than in the question, and he smiled with a cold triumph. He had intended telling Julian now, once for all, to break with the lady of the feathers, of whom even yet he stood in vague fear. But the question, the voice of Julian, gave him pause, slid into his soul a new and bizarre desire, child of the strange intoxication of power which was beginning to grip him, and which the doctor had remarked. If Julian broke with Cuckoo, repulsed her forever into the long street that was her pent and degraded world, would not the sharp salt of Valentine's triumph be taken from him? Would not the wheels of his Juggernaut car fail to do their office in his sight—there was the point!—upon a precious victim? The lady of the feathers thus deliberately abandoned by Julian would suffer perhaps almost to the limit of her capability of pain, but Valentine would have lost sight of her in the dark, and though he would have conquered that spectral opposition which she had whimsically offered to him—he laughed to himself now, thinking of his fear of it—he would not see that greatest vision, the flight of his enemy. These thoughts flashed through his mind, moving him to an answer that astonished Julian.

"Good-bye!" he said. "Why should I wish that?"

"You said the other day at the Savoy that she hated you; that you and she must have a battle unless I chose between you."

"I was laughing."

The lifelessness left Julian's voice as he exclaimed:

"Valentine! But you were—"

"Sober, and you were not. Can you deny it?"

Julian was silent.

"I so little meant that nonsense," Valentine continued, "that I have conceived a plan. To-morrow is the last night of the old year. The doctor asked us to spend it with him. We refused. Providence directed that refusal, for now we are at liberty to celebrate the proper occasion for burying hatchets by burying our particular hatchet. The lady of the feathers, your friend, my enemy, shall see the new year in here, in this tentroom, where long ago we—you and I—with how ill success, sought to exchange our souls."

Julian looked utterly astonished at this proposition.

"Cuckoo wouldn't come here," he began.

"So you said once before. But she came then, and she will come now."

"And then the doctor! If he gets to hear of it! We said we were dining out."

Valentine's hard smile grew yet harder, and his eyes sparkled eagerly.

"I'll arrange that," he said. "The doctor shall come here too."

It seemed indeed as if he meant that his triumph should culminate on this final night of the year, his year. He laughed Julian's astonishment at this vagary aside, sat down and wrote the two notes of invitation, and then went out with Julian, saying:

"Julian, come out with me. You remember what I said about the greedy man? Come; Fate shall present you with another course, one more step towards your caf noir and—happiness. Voil!"

Valentine was right in his supposition that both the lady of the feathers and the doctor would accept his invitation, but he did not understand the precise motive which prompted their acceptance. Nor did he much care to understand it. Cuckoo, Doctor Levillier! After all, what were they to him now? Spectators of his triumph. Interesting, therefore, to a certain extent, as an unpaying audience may be interesting to an actor. Interesting, inasmuch as they could contribute to swell the bladder of his vanity, and follow in procession behind his chariot wheels. But he no longer cared to divine the shades of their emotions, or to busy himself in fathoming their exact mental attitudes in relation to himself. So he thought, touched perhaps with a certain delirium, though not with the delirium of insanity attributed to him by Doctor Levillier.

The doctor had intended celebrating the last night of the year in Harley Street with Cuckoo and the two young men. The refusal of the latter put an end to the opening of his plan of campaign in this strange battle, and he was greatly astonished when he received Valentine's invitation. Still, he had no hesitation in accepting it.

"So," he said to himself, as he read the note, "we join issue within the very wall of the enemy. Poor, deluded, twisted Valentine! that I should have to call him, to think of him as an enemy! We begin the fight within the shadow of our opponent's tent."

Literally that was the fact.

Cuckoo's thoughts were less definite, more tinged with passion, less shaped by the hands of intellect. They were as clouds, looming large, yet misty, hanging loose in torn fragments now, and now merging into indistinguishable fog that yet seemed pregnant with possibilities. Poor thoughts, vague thoughts; yet they pressed upon her brain until her tired head ached. And they stole down to her heart, and that ached too, and hoped and then despaired—then hoped again.



CHAPTER II

CAF NOIR

Snow fell, melodramatically, on the year's death-night. During the day Valentine occupied himself oddly in decorating his flat for the evening. But although he thus seemed to fall in with the consecrated humours of the season his decorations would scarcely have commanded the approval of those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart. He did not put holly rigidly above his doors. No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom. Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad. Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring upon the hurly-burly of furniture and ornaments. In the corners of the room were immense red flowers, such as hang among the crawling green jungles of the West Indies. They gleamed, like flames, amid a shower of cunningly arranged green leaves, and palms sheltered them from the electric rays of the ceiling. The tentroom was a maze of tulips, in vases, in pots, in china bowls that hung by thin chains from the sloping green roof. Few of these tulips were whole coloured. They were slashed, and striped, and spotted with violent hues. Some were of the most vivid scarlet streaked with black. Others were orange-coloured with livid pink spots, circus-pink, such as you see round the eyes of horses bred specially for the ring. There were white tulips, stained as if with blood, pale pink tulips tipped with deepest brown, rose-coloured tulips barred with wounds whose edges were saffron-hued, tulips of a warm wallflower tint dashed with the stormy yellow of an evening sky. And hidden among those scentless flowers, in secret places cunningly contrived, were great groups of hyacinths, which poured forth their thick and decadent scent, breathing heavily their hearts into the small atmosphere of the room, and giving a strange and unnatural soul to the tulips who had spent all their efforts in the attainment of form and daring combinations of colour. As if relapsing into sweet simplicity, after the vagaries of a wayward nature had run their course, Valentine had filled his hall and dining-room with violets, purple and white, and a bell of violets hung from the ceiling over the chair which the lady of the feathers was to occupy at dinner. These were white only, white and virginal, flowers for some sweet woman dedicated to the service of God, or to the service of some eternal altar-flame burning, as the zeal of nature burns, through all the dawning and fading changes of the world.

Thus Valentine passed his day among flowers, and only when the last twilight of the year fell had he fixed the last blossom in its place. Then he rested, as after six days of creation, and from the midst of his flowers saw the snow falling delicately upon London. Lights began to gleam in the tall houses opposite his drawing-room windows. He glanced at them, and they brought him thoughts at which he smiled. Behind those squares of light he imagined peace and good will in enormous white waistcoats and expansive shirt-fronts, red-faced, perhaps even whiskered, getting ready for good temper and turkey, journalistic geniality and plum pudding. And holly everywhere, with its prickly leaves and shining, phlegmatic surfaces.

Peace and good will!

He glanced at his orchids and at the red West Indian flowers, and he thought of those crawling green jungles from which they should have come, and smiled gently.

Peace and good will!

He went to dress.

* * * * *

Meanwhile, in the Marylebone Road the lady of the feathers achieved her toilet, assisted by Jessie. The only evening dress that Cuckoo possessed had been given to her long ago by a young man in the millinery department of a large London shop. For a week he had adored Cuckoo. During that week he had presented her with this tremendous gift. She went into her bedroom now, took it out and looked at it. The gown rustled a great deal whenever it was moved; this had been the young man's idea. He considered that the more a gift rustled, the more aristocratic it was, and, being well acquainted with all the different noises made by different fabrics, he had selected one with a voice as of many waters. Cuckoo heard it now as in a dream. She laid it down upon the bed and regarded it by candle-light. The young man's taste in sound found its equivalent in his taste in colour. The hue of the gown was also very loud, the brightest possible green, trimmed with thick yellow imitation lace. Once it had enchanted Cuckoo, she had put it on with a thrill to go to music-halls with the young man. But now she gazed upon it with a lack lustre and a doubtful eye. The flickering flame of the candle lit it up in patches, and those patches had a lurid aspect. Remembering that Julian had liked her best in black, she shrank from appearing before him in anything so determined. Yet it was her only dress for the evening, and at first she supposed the wearing of it to be inevitable. She put it on and went in front of the glass. In these days she had become even thinner than of old, and more haggard. The gown increased her tenuity and pallor to the eye, and, after a long moment of painful consideration, Cuckoo resolved to abandon these green glories. Once her mind was made up, she was out of the dress in an instant; time was short. She hurriedly extracted her black gown from the wardrobe, caught hold of a pair of scissors, and in a few minutes had ripped the imitation lace from its foundations and was transferring it with trembling fingers to Julian's gift. Never before had she worked at any task with such grim determination, or with such deftness; inspired by exceptional circumstances, she might for twenty minutes have been a practised dressmaker. Certainly, pins were called in as weapons to the attack; but what of that? Compromises are often only stuck together with pins. In any case Cuckoo was not entirely in despair with the new aspect of an old friend, and when she was ready was able at least to hope that things might have been worse.

Putting on over the dress a black jacket, she went out into the passage and called down to Mrs. Brigg, who, as usual, was wandering to and fro in her kitchen, like an uneasy shade in nethermost Hades.

"Mrs. Brigg! Mrs. Brigg, I say!"

"Well?"

"Where's the whistle?"

Mrs. Brigg came to the bottom of the kitchen stairs.

"What d' yer want it for?"

"A cab, of course," cried Cuckoo, in the narrow voice of one in a hurry.

"A cab!" rejoined Mrs. Brigg, ascending the dark stairs all the time she was speaking. "And what do you want with cabs, I should like to know? Who pays for 'em, that's what I say; who's to do it?"

Her grey head hove in sight.

"Where are you going? Piccadilly?"

"No; get the whistle."

"What—and no hat!"

She was evidently impressed.

"A toff is it?" she ejaculated, obviously appeased. "Well! so long as I get the rent I—"

With a white glare Cuckoo seized the whistle from her claw, and in a moment was driving away through the snow.

Mrs. Brigg trotted back to the kitchen decidedly relieved. Cuckoo's suddenly altered mode of life had tried her greatly. The girl had taken to going out in the day and staying at home at night. Simultaneously with this changed rgime her funds had evidently become low. She had begun to live less well, to watch more keenly than of old the condition in which her commons went down to the kitchen and returned from it on the advent of the next meal. By various little symptoms the landlady knew that her lodger was getting hard up. Yet no amount of badgering and argument would induce Cuckoo to say why she sat indoors at night. She acknowledged that she was not ill. Mrs. Brigg had been seriously exercised. But now her old heart was glad. Cuckoo was, perhaps, mounting into higher circles, circles in which hats were not worn during the evening. And as Mrs. Brigg entered her nethermost hell she broke into a thin, quavering song:

"In 'er 'air she wore a white cam-eeiyer, Dark blue was the colour of 'er heye."

It was her song of praise. She always sang it on great occasions.

When the lady of the feathers reached Victoria Street she found the little party already assembled. Valentine met her ceremoniously in the violet-scented hall and helped her to slide out of her jacket. His glance upon the imitation lace was quick and gay, but Cuckoo did not see it. She was gazing at the flowers, and when she entered the drawing-room and found herself in the midst of the orchids, the West Indian flowers and the palms, her astonishment knew no bounds.

"I never!" she murmured under her breath.

Then she forgot the flowers, having only time to remember to be shy. Dinner was immediately announced by Wade, whose years of trained discretion could not banish a faint accent of surprise from his voice. He was, in fact, boulevers by this celebration of the death of the old year. Valentine offered Cuckoo his arm. She took it awkwardly, with a shooting glance of question at the doctor, who seemed her only spar in this deep social sea. Valentine placed her beneath the bell of violets, and took his seat beside her. Julian was on her other hand, the doctor exactly opposite. Wade presented her with hors-d'oeuvres. Cuckoo selected a sardine. She understood sardines, having met them at the Monico. Valentine and the doctor began to talk. Julian ate slowly, and Cuckoo stole a glance at him. His aspect startled her so much that she with difficulty repressed a murmur of astonishment. He had the appearance of one so completely exhausted as to be scarcely alive. Most people, however stupid, however bored, have some air, when in society, of listening even when they do not speak, of giving some sort of attention to those about them, or to the place in which they find themselves. They glance this way and that, however phlegmatically. They bend in attention or lean back in observation. It is seen that they are conscious of their environment. But Julian was engrossed with fatigue. The lids drooped over his eyes. His face wore a leaden hue. Even his lips were colourless. He ate slowly and mechanically till his plate was empty. Then he laid down his fork and remained motionless, his eyes still cast down towards the tablecloth, his two hands laid against the table edge, while the fingers were extended upon the cloth on either side of his plate. Cuckoo looked at him with terror, wondering if he were ill. Then, glancing up, she met the eyes of the doctor. They seemed to bid her take no heed of Julian's condition, and she did not look at him again just then. Trying to control her fears, she listened to Valentine's conversation with the doctor.

"Doctors are sceptics by profession," she heard him say.

"I believe in individualism too firmly to allow that any beliefs or unbeliefs can be professional, Cresswell."

"Possibly you are right," Valentine answered lightly. "What a pity it is that there is no profession of which all the members at least believe in themselves."

"Ah; would you enter it?"

"I scarcely think it would be necessary."

He glanced first at the doctor, then at Cuckoo as he spoke.

"I am thankful to say," he added in his clear, cool voice, "that I have no longer either the perpetual timidity of the self-doubter or even the occasional anxiety of the egoist."

"You have passed into a region which even egoism cannot enter."

"Possibly—the average egoism."

"The average egoism of the end of the century moves in a very rarefied air."

"Its feet touch ground nevertheless."

"And yours?"

Valentine only laughed, as if he considered the question merely rhetorical or jocose.

"But we are getting away from the question, which was not personal," he said. "I contend that doctors, as a body, are bound to combat these modern Athenians, who are inclined to attribute everything to some obscure action of the mind. For, if their beliefs are founded on rock, and if they can themselves sufficiently, by asceticism, or by following any other fixed course of life which they may select as the right one, train their minds to do that which they believe can be done, the profession of doctors may in time be abolished. Mind will be the universal medicine; will, not simply the cure, but the preventive, of disease."

"And of death?" the doctor asked quietly. "Will man be able to think himself into an eternity on earth?"

Valentine looked at him very strangely.

"You ask that question seriously?" he said.

"I ask seriously whether you think so."

It was evident that the doctor meant to make the question above all things a personal one. This time Valentine accepted that condition. He sat for a moment twisting his champagne-glass about in his long fingers, and glancing rapidly from the doctor to Cuckoo, who heard this conversation without very well understanding it. Indeed, she sat beneath her bell of violets in much confusion, distraite in her desire to command intellectual faculties which she did not possess. Valentine watched her narrowly, though he seemed unattentive to her. Perhaps he thought of his delivery of his gospel to her, and wondered if she recalled it at this moment; or perhaps once more he began to rejoice in her mental distress and alienation.

"Wade," he said "the champagne to Mr. Addison. Well, doctor, suppose I acknowledged that I did so—mind, I don't acknowledge it!—you might, on your side, think something too—that I am mad, for instance. Ah! Miss Bright has knocked over her glass!"

Cuckoo murmured a stumbling apology, gazing with nervous intentness at Valentine. It seemed to her that he had a gift of divination. Doctor Levillier laughed gently.

"I am not inclined to suppose all my opponents in thought mad," he said. "Still, such a belief would certainly indicate in the holder of it the possession of a mind so uncommon, so unique, I may say, that it would naturally rouse one to very close attention and observation of it."

"Exactly," Valentine rejoined.

A certain audacity was slowly creeping into his demeanour and growing while he talked. It manifested itself in slight gesticulations, conceited movements of the hand and head, in the colour of the voice and the blunt directness of his glances.

"Exactly. Attention and observation directed towards the object of satisfying yourself that the man—myself, let us say—was mad? You don't reply. Let me ask you a question. Why should a profound belief in human power of will indicate madness?"

"A belief that is not based on any foundation or proof—that is my point. An extraordinary belief, personal to one person, rejected by mankind in the mass, and founded upon nothing, no fact, no inference even, in the history of mankind, is decidedly a strong indication of dementia."

"But suppose it is a belief founded upon a fact?"

"Of course that would entirely alter the matter."

The two men looked across at one another with a long and direct glance full in the eyes. Cuckoo watched them anxiously. Julian sat with his eyes cast down. He seemed unaware that there was any one near him, any conversation going on around him. Wade moved softly about, ministering to the wants of his master's guests. Course succeeded course.

"Do you propose to give me a fact proving the reasonableness of entertaining a belief that a man, by his own deliberate action of the will, can compass immortality on earth, or even prolong his life in such a way as this, for instance; by the successful domination, or banishment, of any disease recognized as mortal?—For I acknowledge that the will to live may prolong for a certain time a life threatened merely by the sapping action of old age.—Do you propose to give me a fact to prove that?"

"I do not say that I intend to give it to you," Valentine answered, with scarcely veiled insolence.

"But you know of such a fact?" said the doctor, ignoring his host's tone.

"Possibly."

The voice of Valentine thrilled with triumph as he spoke the word. Again he glanced at the lady of the feathers.

"Cannot you convert the doctor?" he asked her, in tones full of sarcastic meaning. "You know something of my theories, something of their putting into practice."

"I don't know—I don't understand," she murmured helplessly.

She looked down at her plate, flushing scarlet with a sense of shame at her own complete mental impotence.

"What's the matter, Cuckoo?"

The words came slowly from the lips of Julian, whose heavy eyes were now raised and fixed with a stare of lethargic wonder upon Cuckoo.

"What are they saying to you?"

His look travelled on, still slow and unwieldy, to the doctor and to Valentine.

"I won't have Cuckoo worried," he said. And then he relapsed with a mechanical abruptness upon the consideration of his food. Valentine seemed about to make some laughing rejoinder, but, after a glance at Julian, he apparently resigned the idea as absurd, and, turning again to the doctor, remarked:

"It is sometimes injudicious to state all that one knows."

"Still more so all that one does not know. But I have no desire to press you," the doctor said, lightly. "This is wonderful wine. Where did you get it?"

"At the Cercle Blanc sale," Valentine answered quickly.

It seemed that he was slightly irritated. He frowned and cast a glance that was almost threatening upon the doctor.

"Would you assume weakness in every strong man who refuses to take off his coat, roll up his shirt sleeve and display the muscle of his arm?" he said, harshly.

"The case is not analogous. That muscle exists in the world is a proved fact. When I was at Eton, I was knocked down by a boy stronger than I was. Since then I acknowledge the power of muscle."

"And have you never been knocked down mentally?"

"Not in the way you suggest."

Valentine shifted in his seat. It did not escape the doctor that he had the air of a man longing to either say or do something startling, but apparently held back by tugging considerations of prudence or of expediency.

"Some day you may be," he said at last, obviously conquered by this prompting prudence.

"When I am, the 'Christian scientist' who once declared to me that she cured a sprained ankle by walking on it many miles a day, and thinking it was well while she walked, shall receive my respectful apologies," the doctor answered, laughing.

Valentine handed the lady of the feathers some strawberries. On her nervous refusal of them he exclaimed:

"I see you have finished your wine, doctor. No more? Really? Nor you, Julian?"

Julian made no reply. He simply pushed his glass a little away from him.

"Then shall we accompany Miss Bright into the tentroom? I thought we would have coffee there. You have never seen the tentroom," he added to Cuckoo, getting up from his seat as he spoke.

"I usually sit in it when I am alone or with Julian. You will not mind our cigarettes, I know."

He led the way down the scented corridor, scented with the thin, gently bright scent of violets.

"The tentroom has a history," he continued to Cuckoo, opening a door on the left. "It was once the scene of an—an absurd experiment. Eh, doctor?"

They entered the room. As they did so the hot, sticky scent of the hidden hyacinths poured out to meet them. For a moment it seemed overwhelming, and Cuckoo hung back with an almost unconquerable sensation of aversion and even of fear. The aspect of this small room astonished her; she had never seen any chamber so arranged. Certainly, it looked very unusual to-night. The small fire was hidden by a large screen of white wood, with panels of dull green brocade. Only one of the electric lamps was turned on, and that was shaded, so that the diffused light was faint, a mere unflickering twilight. The masses of tulips hung like quantities of monotonously similar shadows from the tented ceiling, and the flood of scent caused the room to seem even smaller than it really was, a tiny temple dedicated to the uncommon, perhaps to the sinister.

"We will see the old year out and drink our caf noir here," said Valentine. "Where will you sit, Miss Bright?"

"I don't mind. It's all one to me," murmured Cuckoo. "What a funny room, though!" she could not help adding. "It ain't like a room at all."

"Imagine it an Arab tent, the home of a Bedouin Sheik in a desert of Nubia," said Valentine. "This divan is very comfortable. Let me arrange the cushions for you."

As he bent over her to do so, he murmured in her ear:

"And you, having tossed your will away, are nothing!"

They had been the last words of his gospel, proclaimed to her that night on which she prayed!

The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet; the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action, she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the doctor's trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer, incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that encompasses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human lives with mystery. She looked up at him with this world of mingling knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling sensation of frigid awe.

"What—what?" he began. Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly away.

"Sit down, doctor. Do you like my flowers? Julian, are you still tired? The coffee will wake you up. A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar? Here are the matches."

Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo. His unnatural lethargy was gradually passing away into a more explicable fatigue, no longer speechless. Leaning on his elbow, he looked into her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim pathos. It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during the evening was still Cuckoo's confusion over her own misunderstanding at dinner, for he now again referred to it.

"Have they been chaffing you, Cuckoo?" he said, striking a match on the heel of his shoe and lighting a cigarette. "Have they been worrying you? Never mind. It's only Val's fun. He doesn't mean anything by it. I say, how awfully pale you look to-night, and thin."

He paused, considering her with a glance that was almost severe.

"I'm all right," said Cuckoo, trying to repress the agitation she always felt now when speaking to Julian. "I ain't ill. Why don't you come to see me now?" she added. "You don't never come."

Julian glanced over to Valentine, who was standing by the hearth talking to the doctor, who sat in an armchair.

"I've been busy," he said. "I've had a lot of things to do. Do you miss me, Cuckoo, when I don't come?"

"Yes," she replied, but without softness. Then she added, lowering her voice almost to a whisper:

"Don't he want you to come?"

Julian did not reply, but puffed rather moodily at his cigarette, glancing towards Valentine. He was thinking of the conversation at the Savoy and of the antagonism between Valentine and Cuckoo. Suddenly there came into his mind a dull wish to reconcile these two on the last night of the year, to—in Valentine's own words—bury the hatchet. He sat meditating over his plan and trying to revolve different and dramatic methods of accomplishing it. Presently he said:

"Cuckoo, you and Val have got to be friends from to-night."

She started, stirring uneasily on the great cushions that were heaped at her back.

"We are," she said.

He shook his head.

"Not real friends."

"Oh, we are all right."

"D'you hate him still?"

"He don't like me," she answered, evasively.

"Yet he invites you here," Julian said. "Why does he do that?"

"I dunno," Cuckoo said.

She wondered why. Not so the doctor, to whom it had become evident that Valentine had asked his guests out of vanity, and with a view to some peculiar and monstrous display of his power over Julian. While Cuckoo and Julian talked together on the divan Valentine came over to the doctor. His eyes still held an expression of awe created in him by the strange new glance of the lady of the feathers. He sought to conquer this sensation of awe, which fought fiercely against his intended blatant triumph of to-night.

"Your cigarette all right, doctor?" he said, in a quick voice.

"A delicious one, thanks."

Valentine began touching the ornaments on the mantelpiece with nervous fingers.

"We didn't quite finish our conversation at dinner," he said.

"No?"

"I did not give you a reason for my belief."

A deep interest woke in the doctor, but he did not show it. He thought:

"So, he must insanely return to this one subject, round which his brain makes an eternal tour."

"No," he said aloud; "you have a reason then?"

"Yes."

Valentine's voice vibrated with arrogance. His hand still darted to and fro on the mantelpiece while he stood looking down at the doctor. There was something in his manner that suggested a mixture of triumph and fighting anxiety in his mind. But, as he continued to speak, the former got the upper hand.

"A reason that might convince even you if you knew it."

"Convince me, of exactly what?" the doctor asked, indifferently.

His indifference seemed to pique Valentine, who replied with energy:

"That human will can be cultivated, has been developed, until it has moved the mountain, achieved the thing men call a miracle."

"By whom has it been so developed?"

Valentine hesitated almost like one who fears to be led into a trap. The doctor could see "By me!" trembling upon his lips. He didn't actually utter it, but instead exclaimed with a laugh:

"Some day you will discover."

And as he spoke he looked at Julian and the lady of the feathers. The doctor was anxious to lead him on, and leaning easily back in his comfortable chair, occupied himself with his cigarette for a minute, as a man calmly at ease. Between his whiffs he presently threw out carelessly:

"This man has compassed eternity by his own will?"

"Oh, I did not say that."

"He has contented himself with curing a sprained ankle by walking upon it, like my Christian scientist?"

"Now you fly to the other extreme—from the very great to the very little. Take a middle course."

"Where would that lead me?"

Valentine threw a glance round the dim, hot, scented little room, then once more his eyes rested on Julian and Cuckoo.

"What if I said—To this little room, to Julian and that girl, to myself?" he answered in a low voice.

"And the miracle?" said the doctor.

The door opened. Wade appeared with coffee.



CHAPTER III

THE HEALTH OF THE NEW YEAR

Valentine turned quickly, with an air of mingled irritation and relief at the interruption.

"We must all take coffee," he cried. "It will give us impetus, vitality, so that as the old year dies we may live more swiftly, more strongly. I like to feel that my life is increasing while that of another—the old year for instance—is decreasing."

But the doctor noticed that his eyes had rested with a curiously significant expression upon Julian as he spoke the last sentence.

"Leave the coffee-pot on that little table," he added to Wade, when the man had filled all four cups. "We may want it."

Wade obeyed him and disappeared.

"Your man makes wonderful coffee," the doctor said, sipping.

"Yes. Julian, have you reached that caf noir I spoke of the other day?" Valentine asked laughingly, returning to his simile of the greedy man and happiness.

"I don't know. Not yet, Val, I think," Julian answered. This coffee seemed to give him life at last. The heavy weariness disappeared from his face. His eyes gleamed with something of their old youthfulness and ardour.

"If so, I must be close on happiness," he added.

As he spoke he looked into the hollow eyes of Cuckoo, seeming, strangely, to seek in them the will-o'-the-wisp of which he spoke.

"Never look for it in unfurnished rooms," Valentine exclaimed with sudden violence.

This glance of Julian, so the doctor judged, precipitated his curious and subtle insanity towards an outburst.

"You will find it in the thing that is most definite, not in the thing that is most indefinite. Isn't it so, doctor? Happiness lies in the positive, not in the negative."

"Happiness lies in many places. Each finds it in a different house."

"Perhaps you can't tell where I should find it, Val," Julian interposed, with a certain sturdiness of manner.

"No," said Cuckoo, eagerly.

The coffee, it appeared, had an effect upon her too. There was a life, a keen intentness in her thin, white face, not visible there before. Valentine turned round upon her. He was holding his coffee cup in his right hand. With the other he put his cigarette to his lips.

"Can you tell us where Mr. Addison is likely to find happiness?" he said. "Can you tell us, lady of the feathers?"

"No. He can tell himself. That's all," she said. "Let him find it himself."

"Each for himself and God for us all, eh?"

"I don't know about God," she said, looking towards the doctor as if for assistance.

"Each for another and God for us all is perhaps a better motto," the doctor interposed.

"Ah, Charity!"

Valentine took out his watch and looked at it.

"Charity! Midnight is approaching, and, of course, this is Charity's benefit-night by common consent. Thank you, doctor, for the hint. Did the dying old year prompt you with its husky voice full of the wind and of the snow?"

"Possibly."

"Let us have some more coffee. Julian, give me Miss Bright's cup. You shall have your absinthe presently. Wade has not forgotten it."

"Absinthe?" said the doctor.

"Julian drinks it every night. He has got tired of whiskey. Doctor, your cup too."

"We shall not sleep a wink to-night."

"All the better. Why should not we see the dawn in, as we did once before? You recollect."

"Ah, Val! on the night of your trance."

"Yes. You were not here then, lady of the feathers."

He spoke with a light mockery.

"I fainted, or died—the doctor was deceived into thinking so—and was born again in the dawn of the very day on which Julian first met you."

Cuckoo shivered with the recollection of Marr and her horror of that night.

"Why do you shiver?" Valentine continued. "Do you find the room cold?"

"No, no."

Indeed, the heat and the overpowering scent of the hyacinths had previously weighed upon her physique, and increased the malaise into which her curious new dutifulness, and the faint spectre which drew near to her, had brought her.

"Perhaps you shiver in the influence of this little room," he continued, persistently. "Julian and I once did so. Eh, Julian?"

"Yes, in those sittings."

"I didn't shiver," Cuckoo said, bluntly and very obviously lying.

She quickly drank some more coffee.

"If you had, it might not have been astonishing," said Valentine. "For this little room has seen marvels, and strange things that happen perhaps stamp their strange impression upon the places in which they happen. We ought to discuss the occult, doctor, on the last night of the year."

"By all means."

"How long ago it seems!" Julian said suddenly, with a sigh.

"Yes," Valentine answered. "Because so much has happened in the interval. The greedy man has eaten so many courses, Julian."

He seemed to take a delight in throwing out allusions to one and the other of his guests, allusions which nobody but the person addressed could understand rightly. For he now went on, addressing himself to Cuckoo:

"In this little room was committed the great act of brigandage of which I once spoke to you. Do you remember?"

She shook her head.

"Never mind. But, though you cannot remember, that might make you shiver."

"What act of brigandage, Valentine?" Julian asked.

"Oh, the attempt—my attempt to seize upon a different soul."

"But you failed."

"Did I? Do you think so, doctor?"

His apparent audacity seemed to increase. In the twilight of the scented room he drew himself up as he stood by the brocaded screen that hid the fire. He closed and unclosed rapidly his left hand which hung at his side. His foot tapped the thick carpet gently.

"Did you not?" the doctor answered quietly.

But Julian was roused to vivacity.

"What do you mean, Valentine?" he said. "Of course you may have changed, or developed, or whatever you like to call it, since then. But to say you have got a different soul!"

"Is absurd? Yes, you are right. Because if I had got a different soul the original 'I,' that was dissatisfied with itself, must have ceased to be. Since the soul of a man—his will to do things, his will to feel things—is the man himself, if I had a different soul I should be another man. The former man would have ceased to be."

"Or would be elsewhere."

It was the doctor who spoke, and he spoke without special interest, simply expressing his thought of what might happen in so whimsical an event as that harped upon by Valentine. But Valentine seemed painfully struck by the almost idle words.

"Elsewhere!" he exclaimed, with a lowering expression. "What do you mean, doctor? What do you imply?"

The doctor looked at him surprised.

"Merely that a thing expelled is not necessarily a thing slain. If you turn me out of this room I am not certain to expire on the doormat."

Valentine broke into a nervous and uneasy laugh, and cast a quick glance all around him, and especially on Cuckoo, who sat listening silently with her eyebrows drawn together in a pent frown of puzzled attention.

"I see, I see," he said hastily. And here Julian broke in.

"But the whole thing's impossible," he said with a laugh.

"You would say so, doctor?"

Valentine addressed this question to Doctor Levillier in a very marked and urgent manner.

"You would say so, since the will of man cannot perform miracles?"

"Certainly, I should say so, despite the triumphs of hypnotism. A man may change greatly through outside influence, or perform occasional acts foreign to his nature under the influence of 'suggestion' or hypnotism. But I do not believe he can change radically and permanently, except from one cause."

The last words were spoken after a moment of hesitation. Valentine rejoined quickly:

"What? What? One cause, you say! You allow that—wait, though! What is the cause?"

Doctor Levillier was silent. He was asking himself should he play this forcing card, make this sharp, cutting experiment. He resolved that he would make it.

"A man may change radically," he said, "if he becomes insane."

A short breath, like a sigh, came from Cuckoo. Valentine stood quite still, regarding the doctor closely for a moment. Then he said contemptuously:

"Mad! Oh, madmen don't interest me."

The doctor had gained nothing from his experiment. It was impossible to gather from Valentine's manner that he was in any way struck by this suggestion, and indeed he abandoned all allusion to it with careless haste, and returned to that other suggestion of which the doctor himself had thought nothing.

"Supposing the soul of a man to be expelled," he said, abruptly, "where—where do you suppose it would go, would be?"

It was obvious that he endeavoured to speak lightly, but there was a most peculiar anxiety visible in his manner. The doctor wondered from what cause it sprang.

"I have never formed a supposition on that matter," he said.

"Well—well—try to form one now. Yes, and you, Julian, too."

He did not address himself to the lady of the feathers, but he looked at her long and narrowly. The doctor lit another cigarette. He seemed to be seriously considering this odd question. Julian, whose lethargy was changing into an almost equally pronounced excitement, was not so hesitating. As if struck by a sudden flashing idea, he exclaimed:

"How if it was in the air? How if it was wandering about from place to place. By God, Val!" he cried, with emphasis, "do you know what I read in a book I took up from your shelves the other day—something about souls being like flames? It was in Rossetti: Flames!"

He turned to Cuckoo and stared into her eyes.

"I was half asleep when I read it," he said. "Why should I remember it now? That flame—I saw that flame months ago." He seemed like a man puzzling something out, trying to trace a way through a tangled maze of thought that yet might be clear. "It came from you, Val, that night, with a cry like a lost thing. A soul expelled, did you say?"

Suddenly his face was set in an awestruck gravity.

"Why—but then, if so, that flame would be you. Valentine, the flame that seemed to haunt me, that I have seen in—"

He looked at Cuckoo again and was silent.

"Yes, Julian?" Valentine said in a hard, thin voice. "Go on, I am listening."

Julian stared at him with strong excitement.

"And what are you, then, Valentine? Where do you come from?" he said slowly.

"From Marr."

The words came from the divan, from the dry lips of Cuckoo. Doctor Levillier knew not why, but he was thrilled to the very soul by them, as by a revelation throwing strong light upon the depths of things. Whether it was the influence of this strange scented room, in which strange things had happened, or the influence of the hour and the climax and death of the year, or a voice in his heart speaking to him with authority, he could not tell. Only he knew that on a sudden all his guiding reason, all his knowledge, all his cool contemplation of the physician and common sense of the man, were swept entirely away. His theory of insanity seemed in a moment the theory of a dwarf intellect trying to stick wretched, absurd pins through angels—white or black—that it thought butterflies. His conversation with Cuckoo on the Hampstead Heights seemed the vain babble of a tricked and impotent observer. His mind fell on its knees before the mind of the lady of the feathers. Reason was stricken by instinct. The confused feeling of the woman had conquered the logical inferences of the man. From that moment the doctor secretly abandoned the old landmarks which had guided him all his life, and entered into a new world—a world in which he would not have dreamed of permitting any of his patients to walk if he could help it. A strange magic floated round him like a mist blotting out the crude familiarities of the normal world. The tentroom, with its shadowy tulips, its scented warmth, its pale twilight, its quick silences when voices ceased, was a temple of wonder and a home of the miraculous. And those gathered in it, what were they? Men and a woman? Bodies? Earthly creatures? No. To his mind they were stripped bare of the clothes in which man—governed by decrees of some hidden power—must make his life pilgrimage. They were stripped bare and naked of their bodies. They were warm, stirring, disembodied things—they were flames leaping, waving, contending, aspiring. And he remembered the night when he sat alone in the drawing-room of Valentine, and saw the red walls glow, and the light deepen, and saw the stillness grow to movement, and the shadows come away from their background, and take forms—the forms of flames. Was that night a night of prophesy? Were those flames silent voices speaking to the ear of his mind? He looked around him like a man in a strange country, who takes a long breath and liberates his soul in wonder. He looked around, and the shadowy, thin girl leaning forward on the divan, with one arm outstretched as if she gave a message, was among the other flames as a flame upon an altar. At least his instinct had not played him false with regard to her. He knew it now. In the wild and sad streets, where feet of men tread ever, where tears of women flow ever, grow flowers of Paradise, strange flowers, leap flames from the eternal fires of heaven. And the voice of Cuckoo thrilled him as the voice of revelation.

Valentine turned upon the lady of the feathers, hearing her cry.

"Marr!" he said, "your lover who died! Ah!"

The brutality of the remark was so unexpected, so savage, that it struck all those who heard it like a whip. Cuckoo shrank back among her cushions trembling. Julian made a slight forward movement as if to stop Valentine. The doctor laid his hands on the arms of his chair and pressed them hard. He felt a need of physical energy. In the sudden silence Valentine touched the electric bell. Before any one spoke it was answered by Wade, who carried a tray on which stood various bottles and glasses.

"We must counteract the exciting effects of our caf noir," Valentine said, addressing his guests in a group. "Otherwise we shall be strung up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or of spectres. Julian, here is your absinthe. What will you drink, Miss Bright? Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?"

"Lemonade, please," Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper.

The tears were crowding in her eyes. She dared not look Julian in the face. Never before had her past risen up before her painted in such grim and undying colours. The reprise of Valentine had been as the reprise of a Maxim gun to a volley fired by a child from an air-tube. So Cuckoo felt. But how greatly was she deceived! Perhaps physical conditions played a subtle part in the terrible desolation that seized her now, after her outburst of daring and of excitement. The warmth and smallness of the room, the penetrating scent that filled it, even the movements of her companions, the sound of their voices, suddenly became almost insupportable to Cuckoo. She was the victim of a reaction that was so swift and so intense as to be unnatural. And in it both her mind and body were bound in chains. Then she was petrified. Her very heart felt cold and cramped, and then hard, icy, inhuman. Her tears did not fall, but were dried up in her eyes, like dew by a scorching sun. She looked at Julian, and felt as indifferent towards him as if he had been a shadow on the grass in the evening time. Then he became remote, with a removedness attained by no shadow even. For a shadow is in the world, and Julian seemed beyond the world to Cuckoo. She thought, even repeated, with tiny lip-movements, the cruel words of Valentine, and they seemed to her no longer cruel, or of any meaning, bad or good. For they came from too far away. They were as a cry of shrill music from a cave leagues onward beyond the caves of any winds.

Valentine poured out some lemonade and gave it to her. She accepted it mechanically. She even put it to her lips and drank some of it. But her palate was aware of no flavour, no coolness of liquid. And she continued sipping without tasting anything.

Meanwhile Julian was saying to Valentine:

"I don't think I'll take any absinthe to-night. Give me some lemonade too."

"Lemonade for you? Nonsense. I ordered the absinthe specially. You must have some. Here it is."

As he spoke he poured some of the opalescent liquid into a tumbler and handed it to Julian. While he did so his eyes were on the doctor and they gleamed again with a sort of audacity or triumph. He seemed recovering himself, returning to his former mood and veiled intentions. And Doctor Levillier thought he saw the flame of Valentine's soul glow more deeply and fiercely. The three men, as if with one accord, ignored the lady of the feathers at this period of the evening. Valentine, having shot his bolt, left his victim to shudder in the dust. Julian and the doctor, full of pity or of wonder, were drawn instinctively to leave her for the moment outside of the circle of intimacy, lest the conflict should be renewed. They did not know how far outside of it she felt; how dim the twilight was becoming to her eyes; how dim the voices to her ears. She lay back on her pillows, in the shadow of the divan, and they supposed her to be listening, as before, to what they said; to be drawing into her nostrils the scent of the hyacinths, and into her soul—it might be—some fragments of their uttered thoughts. But for the moment they seemed to put her outside the door.

Julian did not protest against the absinthe. He took it and placed it on a little table beside him, and as he talked he occasionally drank a little of it, till his glass was empty. Valentine had again looked at his watch.

"The flame of the year is flickering very low," he said.

This simile of the flame of the year, so ordinary, he had spoken against his will. He asked himself angrily why he had said flame, and again the doctor saw the flame of Valentine's soul trying to leap higher, to aspire to some strange and further region than that in which it seemed to dwell. Julian sat looking at Valentine with a gaze that was surely new in his eyes, the dawning gaze of inquiry which a man directs upon a stranger just come into his life. He had not alluded in any way to Cuckoo's startling and vehement interposition. Valentine had killed that conversation with one blow, it seemed. They buried it by deserting it. Yet the thought of it was obviously with them, making quick interchange of words on another subject difficult. Valentine had seized again on the poor, prostrate year; yet he carried even to it the memory of that which seemed to encompass them as with a ring of fire, and that despite himself.

"We shall hear the bells directly," he added. "I hate bells at night. They will sound odd in this room."

"Very odd," the doctor said.

"We ought to sit reviewing our past year," Valentine went on.

"Our past year and all it has done for us."

"Do you think it has done much for you, Addison?" the doctor asked. And, despite his intention, there was a certain significance in his tone.

Julian looked rather grave and moody, yet excited too, like a man who might burst into either gaiety or anger at a moment's notice.

"I suppose it has," he answered. "Yes, more than any year since I was quite a boy."

"It has taught you how to live," Valentine said quickly.

"Or how to—die," the doctor could not resist saying.

"Why do you say that, doctor?" Valentine asked sharply. "Julian is neither sick nor sad; are you, Julian?"

"Oh, I don't know. Don't bother about me."

But Valentine seemed suddenly determined that Julian should state in precise terms his contentment with his present fate.

"You are making your grand tour towards happiness," he exclaimed. "Dessert, caf noir—then the cigarette and contentment."

"I have had the caf noir," Julian said, indicating his empty cup, which Wade had by accident omitted to clear away. "I have had the cigarette."

"Well. What then? Are you unhappy?"

"I tell you I don't know. Give me some more absinthe."

The doctor watched his excitement growing as he drank. It seemed an excitement adverse to Valentine.

"One may have too much black coffee," he suddenly said.

"And that exerts a very depressing effect upon the nerves," said the doctor, taking him literally. "Neither you nor I are likely to sleep well to-night, Addison."

"I never sleep well now, doctor," Julian said.

All this time he continued to regard Valentine in the peculiar, observant manner of a stranger who is trying to make up his mind about the unfamiliar man at whom he looks.

"Then you should not drink black coffee."

As he spoke a very faint sound of bells penetrated to the tentroom.

"The psychological moment!" said Valentine.

And then they were all silent, listening.

To the doctor, the prey of magic art since the soft cry of the lady of the feathers, the bells seemed magical and strange to-night, thin and dreamy and remote. They rang outside the circle of the flames, yet they, too, had an eerie meaning. Nor did their music come, he thought, from any church tower, from any belfry, summoned by the tugging hands of men. Very softly they rang. Their sound was deadened by the thick draperies. They ceased.

"My year is born," Valentine said.

"Your year?" the doctor repeated.

"Yes. I feel that in this year I shall culminate; I shall touch a point; I shall put the corner-stone to the temple of my ambition. No one can prevent me now, no one. Look, she has fainted!"

He had been watching Cuckoo, and had seen her posture of mere rest change, almost imperceptibly, to the prostration of insensibility.

The doctor sprang up from his chair. Julian uttered an exclamation. Valentine only smiled. The door was opened. A fan was used. Air was let into the room. Presently Cuckoo stirred and sat up. The three men were gathered round her, and suddenly Valentine said:

"My trance over again. The lady of the feathers imitates me."

Julian turned round to him with abrupt irritation.

"That's not so," he said. "Cuckoo is herself always." He turned again to her.

"Are you better?" he asked, touching her hand gently.

"Yes, I'm all right. It was—them."

She glanced vaguely round at the tulips, as if searching for the cause of the scent which filled the room.

"There are hyacinths somewhere," the doctor said.

"Yes, they are hidden!" said Valentine. "A hidden power is the greatest power. But now you may see them."

And he drew from a nook, guarded by some large ferns, a pot of red hyacinths.

Cuckoo sat up and drank a little brandy, which the doctor gave to her. Some colour came into her pale and thin cheeks.

"I'm as right as ninepence now," she said, with an effort after brightness.

The bells began again.

"What's that?" she asked. "Not New Year, is it?"

"Yes," answered Valentine. "A happy New Year to you, lady of the feathers."

Julian was struck by a sudden thought.

"Val," he said, "Cuckoo, I want you to be real friends this year."

He caught hold of Valentine's hand and placed it in Cuckoo's. But then, again, a bewilderment seemed to take hold of him, for even as he touched Valentine's hand he looked at him askance, and the eagerness died away from his face.

"I don't know," he muttered to himself, and getting up from the end of the divan, where he had been sitting, he moved away towards the fire, leaving Cuckoo's hand in the hand of Valentine.

Valentine smiled coldly on Cuckoo.

"Lady of the feathers," he said, "we are to be allies."

"What's that?" she asked, pulling her hand away, directly Julian had turned his back upon them.

"When people fight together against a common enemy they are allies."

"Then we ain't," she whispered, "New Year or not."

"You defy me," he said, raising his voice so that the doctor might hear the words.

"Yes," she said.

"Doctor, do you hear?"

He seemed suddenly bent on forcing a quarrel. Doctor Levillier felt again that sense of dread and horror which had attacked him now more than once of late in Valentine's presence. This time the sensation was so acute that he could scarcely combat it sufficiently to reply.

"I hear," he murmured.

"Julian!" Valentine called. "Julian, come here. Miss Bright wishes to tell you something."

Julian turned round.

"Now, lady of the feathers!"

But Cuckoo burst into a shrill little laugh. Her head was spinning again.

"I've nothing—nothing to say," she cried out. "Give me some more brandy."

"Very well. Let us all drink to the health of the New Year."

Valentine filled the glasses—Julian's with absinthe—and gave the toast:

"The New Year!"

They all raised their glasses to their lips simultaneously. One fell with a crash to the ground and was broken. It was Julian's.

"I won't drink it," he said, doggedly, looking at Valentine.

There was a silence. Then Valentine said, calmly:

"Have you an animus against the thing you don't yet know?"

It was sufficiently obvious that he alluded to the year just coming in upon London. But the words were taken by the doctor, and apparently by Julian, in a hidden and different sense.

"Perhaps because I don't yet know it thoroughly, and had thought I did," Julian answered, staring him full in the face still with that strange glance of mingled interrogation and bewilderment.

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