trembling, and drawing her lips together in growing perturbation, till Julian happened to turn towards them.  Then Valentine’s fingers relaxed their grasp quietly, and slipped away.  At the same time he moved with an air of energy, and broke into gay conversation.  His languor vanished.  His blue eyes sparkled.  Julian was astonished at his intense vivacity.  He laughed, made jokes, became absolutely boyish.

“Why, Val, how gay you are!” Julian said.

“Every one is gay to-night.”

He was interrupted by a roar of laughter.  The man in the boots was becoming immoderately whimsical.  His feet seemed to have escaped from control, and to be prancing in Paradise while he looked on in Purgatory.

“Every one is gay.”

As Valentine repeated the words, and the huge theatre laughed like one enormous person, Julian felt again the strange thrill of overmastering excitement that had shaken him on the night when he and Valentine had leaned out of the Victoria Street window.  The strength of the spring and of his long tended and repressed young instincts stirred within him mightily.  Scales fell from his eyes.  From the car of the balloon he gazed down, and it seemed to him that they—­Valentine, Cuckoo, and himself—­were drifting over a new country, of which all the inhabitants were young, gay, careless, rightly irresponsible.  The rows of open-mouthed, laughing faces called to him to join in their mirth,—­more, to join in their lives, and in the lives of the pirouetting hours.  He moved in his chair as if he were impelled to get up and leave his seat.  And as he moved a voice whispered in his ear: 

“Let us eat and drink, for to-morrow we die.”

Was it Valentine’s voice?  He turned round hastily, curiously perturbed.

“Val, was that you?  Did you speak to me?”

“No.”

Julian looked at Cuckoo.  Her cheeks were flushed, and her eyes shone with dancing excitement.

“Did you, Cuckoo?”

“Not I, dearie.  I say, ain’t he funny to-night?”

Then the voice must have spoken in his own brain.  He listened for it and fancied he could hear it again and again, driving him on like a phantom fate.  But the voice was in timbre like the voice of Valentine, and he felt as if Valentine spoke with a strange insistence and reiteration.  His heart, his whole being, made answer to the whisper.

“To-morrow we die.  It is true.  Ah, then, let us—­let us eat and let us drink.”

The man in the boots wriggled furiously into the wings, and the curtain rose on the ballet.  Wenzel had ascended to the conductor’s platform amid loud applause.  The first weary melodies of “Faust” streamed plaintively from the orchestra, and a gravity came over the rows of faces in the stalls.  Julian’s face, too, was grave, but his excitement and his sense of his own power of youth grew as he looked on.  The old Faust appeared, heavy with the years and with