Julian looked up hastily.

“Oh, that sort of complaint, was it?”

He laughed, not without a tinge of bitterness.

“Perhaps he doesn’t want to be cured.”

“I have persuaded him to want to be, I think.”

“Isn’t that rather a priest’s office?” Julian asked.

The doctor noticed that a very faint hostility had crept into his manner.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Such an illness is a matter of temperament, I dare say, and the clergy tinker at our temperaments, don’t they? while you doctors tinker at our bodies.”

“A nerve-doctor has as much to do with mind as body, and no doctor can possibly do much good if he entirely ignores the mind.  But you know my theories.”

“Yes.  They make you clergyman and doctor in one, a dangerous man.”

And he laughed again, jarringly, and shifted in his seat, looking around him with quick eyes.

“What do you think of the room?” he said abruptly.

“I think it entirely spoilt and ruined,” the doctor answered gravely.

“It’s altered, certainly.”

“Yes, for the worse.  It was a beautiful room, one of the most beautiful in London.”

A momentary change came over Julian.  He dropped his hard manner, which seemed an assumption to cover inward discomfort or shame.

“Yes,” he said almost regretfully.  “I suppose it was.  But it’s gayer now, got more things in it.  Full of memories this room is.”

The last remark was evidently put forth as a feeler, to find out what Valentine had been talking about.  Dr. Levillier was habitually truthful, although he could be very reserved if occasion seemed to require it.  At present he preferred to be frank.

“Memories of women,” he remarked.

“Oh, you’ve heard?”

“That several tastes helped to make his room the pandemonium which it is.  Yes.”

“You’re severe, doctor.”

“Perhaps you like the room for its memories, Addison.”

Julian looked doubtful.

“I don’t know.  I suppose so,” he hesitated.

“By the way, is there among these vagrant memories of Circassians, Greeks, and Italians anything chosen by Cuckoo Bright?”

Julian started violently.

“Cuckoo Bright,” he exclaimed, “what do you know of her?”

As he spoke Valentine strolled into the room dressed for dinner.  He was drawing on a pair of lavender gloves, and looked down sideways at his coat to see if his buttonhole of three very pale and very perfectly matched pink roses was quite straight.

“Cuckoo Bright?” he echoed.  “Does everybody know her, then?  How came she into your strict life, doctor?”

Doctor Levillier noticed that Valentine, like Julian, carefully set him aside as a being in some different sphere, much as a great many people insist on setting clergymen.  This fact alone showed that he was talking with two strangers, and seemed to give the lie to long years of the most friendly and almost brotherly intercourse.