Doctor Levillier seemed unable to appreciate that he was speaking seriously.

“I have come all this way to hear you sing,” he said.  “I have never asked you in vain yet.”

“Is it my fault if you ask me in vain now?”

Valentine looked him in the face and spoke with a complete sincerity.  The doctor returned the glance, as he sometimes returned the glance of a patient, very directly, with a clear and simple gravity.  Having done this he felt completely puzzled.

“The talent for music has died in you?” he asked.

“Entirely.  I can do nothing with my piano.  I have even locked it.”

As he spoke he went over to it and pulled at the lid to show them that he was speaking the truth.

“Where’s the key?” asked the doctor.

“Here,” said Valentine, producing it from his pocket.

“Give it to me,” said the doctor.

Valentine did so and the doctor quietly opened the piano, drew up the music-stool, and signed to Valentine to sit down.

“If you mean what you say, the explanation must simply be that you are suffering from some form of hysteria,” he said, rather authoritatively.  “Now sing me something.  No; I won’t let you off.”

Valentine, sitting on the stool, extended his hands and laid the tips of his long fingers upon the keys, but without sounding them.

“You insist on my trying to sing?” he asked.

“I do.”

“I warn you, doctor, you will be sorry if I do.  My voice is quite out of order.”

“No matter.”

“Go on, Val,” cried Julian, from his arm-chair.  “Anybody would think you were a young lady.”

Valentine bent his head, with a quick gesture of abnegation.

“As you will,” he said.

He struck his hand down upon the keys as he spoke.  That was the strangest prelude ever heard.  In their different ways Doctor Levillier and Julian were both intensely fond of music, both quickly stirred by it when it was good, not merely classical, but extravagant, violent, and in any way interesting.  Each of them had heard Valentine play, not once only, but a hundred times.  They knew not simply his large répertoire of pieces and songs through and through, but also the peculiar and characteristic progressions of his improvisations, the ornaments he most delighted in, the wildness of his melancholy, the phantasy of his gaieties; and they knew every tone of his voice, which expressed with an exquisite realism the temperament of his soul.  But now, as Valentine’s hands powerfully struck the keys, they both started and exchanged an involuntary glance of keen surprise.  The first few bars gave the lie to Valentine’s assertion that he could no longer play.  A cataract of notes streamed from beneath his fingers, and of notes so curiously combined, or following each other in such a fantastic array, that they seemed arranged in the musical pattern by an intelligence of the strangest order.  It is