Valentine felt that Julian was being less frank with him than usual.  Perhaps for this reason he was immediately conscious that they were not so much in sympathy as on the two former occasions of their sittings.  Or there might have been some other reason which he could not identify.  It is certain that he gradually became acutely aware of a stifling sense of constraint, which he believed to be greatly intensified by the surrounding darkness and silence.  He wondered if Julian was conscious of it also, and at moments longed to ask.  But something held him back, that curious something which we all feel at times like a strong hand laid upon us.  He made up his mind that this discomfort of his soul, unreasonably considerable though it was, must be due solely to Julian’s abrupt demeanour and obvious desire to check his curiosity about the drawing of the curtain.  But, as the moments ran by, his sense of uneasiness assumed such fantastic proportions that he began to cast about for some more definite, more concrete, cause.  At one instant he found it in the condition of his health.  The day had been damp and dreary, and he had suffered from neuralgia.  Doubtless the pain had acted upon his nervous system, and was accountable for his present and perpetually increasing anxiety.  A little later he was fain to dismiss this supposition as untenable.  His sense of constraint was changing into a positive dread, and not at all of Julian, around whom he had believed that his thoughts were in flight.  Something, he knew not at all what, interposed between him and Julian, and so definitely that Valentine felt as if he could have fixed the exact moment in which the interposition had taken place, as one can fix the exact moment in which a person enters a room where one is sitting.  And the interposition was one of great horror,—­entirely malignant, Valentine believed.

He had an impulse to spring up from the table, to turn on the light, and to say, “Let us make an end of this jugglery!” Yet he sat still, wondering why he did so.  A curiosity walked in his mind, pacing about till he could almost fancy he heard its footsteps.  He sat, then, as one awaiting an arrival, that has been heralded in some way, by a telegram, a message, a carrier-pigeon flown in at an open window.  But the herald, too, was horrible.  What then would follow it?  What was coming?  Valentine felt that he began to understand Marr’s queer remark, “You are en route.”  At the first sitting he had felt a very vague suggestion of immoderate possibilities, made possibilities by the apparently futile position assumed at a table by himself and Julian.  To-night the vague seemed on march towards the definite.  Fancy was surely moving towards fact.