of a ghostly furnace; for these flames had no pleasant crackling voices.  Silently they burned, and fluttered upward noiselessly.  He saw them move this way and that.  Some leaped up; others bent sideways; others wavered uncertainly, as if their desire were incomplete and their intention undecided.  The doctor stared upon them, and listened for the chorus that fires sing to tremble and to murmur from their lips.  Yet they sang no chorus, but always, in a ghostly silence, aspired around him.  He knew himself to be the victim of a delusion.  He knew what he would have said to a patient seeking his aid against such a deception of the senses.  In his common sense he knew this, and yet he gradually lost the notion that he was being deceived, and allowed himself to drift, as he had seen others drift, into the fancy that he was holding strange intercourse with the actual.  These flames were real.  They had forms.  They moved.  They enclosed him in a circle.  They embraced him.  As he watched them he fancied that they longed to be near to him, and—­and—­yes—­so ran his thoughts—­to communicate something to him, to sigh out their fiery hearts on his.  They trembled as if convulsed with emotion, with desire.  They tried to escape from the sinister red background that held them in its grasp as in a leash.  The doctor was impelled ardently to believe that they yearned to find voices and to utter some word.  And then, on a sudden, he recalled Julian’s declaration on the night of Valentine’s trance, that he had seen a flame shine from his friend’s lips, and fade away in the darkness.  He recalled, too, Julian’s question about death-beds.  Was the soul of a man a flame?  And, if so, were these flames many souls, or one soul reproduced on all sides by his excitement, and by the intensity of his gaze after them?

They burned more clearly.  Their forms were more defined.  Then suddenly they grew vague, blurred, faint all around him.  They faded.  They died into the red of the room.  And once more the doctor sat alone.

He listened and heard the click of a key in the front door.  And then suddenly the horror that he had felt long ago, on the night when he was followed in Regent Street, once more possessed him.  He got on his feet to face it, and, as the drawing-room door was pushed slowly open, faced Valentine.

CHAPTER III

THE DOCTOR MEETS TWO STRANGERS

Upon seeing the doctor, Valentine paused on the threshold of the door, and, as he paused, the doctor’s horror fled.

“Valentine,” he said, holding out his hand.

“Doctor.”

Their hands met and their eyes.  And then Levillier had an instant sensation that he shook hands with a stranger.  He looked upon the face of Valentine certainly, but he was aware of a subtle, yet large, change in it.  All the features were surely coarser, heavier.  There was a line or two near the eyes, a loose fullness about the mouth.  Yet, as he looked again, he could not be certain if it were so, or if his memory were at fault, groping after a transformation that was not there.  The words he now said truthfully expressed his real feeling in the matter.