period of the evening.  Valentine, having shot his bolt, left his victim to shudder in the dust.  Julian and the doctor, full of pity or of wonder, were drawn instinctively to leave her for the moment outside of the circle of intimacy, lest the conflict should be renewed.  They did not know how far outside of it she felt; how dim the twilight was becoming to her eyes; how dim the voices to her ears.  She lay back on her pillows, in the shadow of the divan, and they supposed her to be listening, as before, to what they said; to be drawing into her nostrils the scent of the hyacinths, and into her soul—­it might be—­some fragments of their uttered thoughts.  But for the moment they seemed to put her outside the door.

Julian did not protest against the absinthe.  He took it and placed it on a little table beside him, and as he talked he occasionally drank a little of it, till his glass was empty.  Valentine had again looked at his watch.

“The flame of the year is flickering very low,” he said.

This simile of the flame of the year, so ordinary, he had spoken against his will.  He asked himself angrily why he had said flame, and again the doctor saw the flame of Valentine’s soul trying to leap higher, to aspire to some strange and further region than that in which it seemed to dwell.  Julian sat looking at Valentine with a gaze that was surely new in his eyes, the dawning gaze of inquiry which a man directs upon a stranger just come into his life.  He had not alluded in any way to Cuckoo’s startling and vehement interposition.  Valentine had killed that conversation with one blow, it seemed.  They buried it by deserting it.  Yet the thought of it was obviously with them, making quick interchange of words on another subject difficult.  Valentine had seized again on the poor, prostrate year; yet he carried even to it the memory of that which seemed to encompass them as with a ring of fire, and that despite himself.

“We shall hear the bells directly,” he added.  “I hate bells at night.  They will sound odd in this room.”

“Very odd,” the doctor said.

“We ought to sit reviewing our past year,” Valentine went on.

“Our past year and all it has done for us.”

“Do you think it has done much for you, Addison?” the doctor asked.  And, despite his intention, there was a certain significance in his tone.

Julian looked rather grave and moody, yet excited too, like a man who might burst into either gaiety or anger at a moment’s notice.

“I suppose it has,” he answered.  “Yes, more than any year since I was quite a boy.”

“It has taught you how to live,” Valentine said quickly.

“Or how to—­die,” the doctor could not resist saying.

“Why do you say that, doctor?” Valentine asked sharply.  “Julian is neither sick nor sad; are you, Julian?”

“Oh, I don’t know.  Don’t bother about me.”

But Valentine seemed suddenly determined that Julian should state in precise terms his contentment with his present fate.