The tentroom had not been altered.  Still the green draperies, veiled walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling.  The fire danced and shone.  The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness.  Only Rip was gone from the broad and cushioned divan upon which he had loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and Julian listened or replied.  The room was the same, and this very fact emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it.  They leaned in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to time in cigarette-smoke.  No sound of London reached them in this small room.  Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain.  Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul.  The face of Julian was drawn and heavy.  His eyes were downcast.  His arms hung over the cushioned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued.  From time to time he opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if he ground them together.  The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth.  The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the steps of evening on an autumn day—­grey, as if it clothed processes of decay and desolation.  Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon a doorstep.  Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the creaking threshold of premature age.

The change in Valentine was far less marked to a careless eye.  There was still a peculiar cleanness in his large blue eyes, a white delicacy in his features.  The lips of his mouth were red and soft, not dry, as were the lips of Julian.  The crisp gold of his hair caught the light, and his lithe figure rested in his chair in a calm posture of pleasant ease.  Yet he, too, was changed.  Expression of a new nature now no longer lurked furtively in his face, but boldly, even triumphantly, asserted itself.  It did not shrink behind a soft smile, or glide and pass in a fleeting gaiety, but stared upon the world with something of the hard and fixed immobility of a mask.  Every mask, whatever expression be painted upon it, wears a certain aspect of shamelessness.  Valentine’s was a hard and shameless face, although his features, if coarser than of old, were still noble, and, in line, a silent legend of almost priestly intellectuality.

He was looking across at Julian, who held idly between his lax fingers a letter written with violet ink upon pink paper, which had a little bird stamped in the left-hand corner.

“When did you get it?” he said.

“Two or three days ago, I think.  I can’t remember.  I can’t remember anything now,” Julian answered heavily.

“And you have had two since?”

“Yes.  And to-day she called.”