“Perhaps because I don’t yet know it thoroughly, and had thought I did,” Julian answered, staring him full in the face still with that strange glance of mingled interrogation and bewilderment.

Valentine watched him.

“You are treating the poor thing—­and my carpet—­scurvily, Julian,” he said.  “And you have startled Miss Bright.”

Cuckoo’s eyes were shining.

“No,” she ejaculated.

Valentine rang the bell and directed Wade to collect the fragments of glass.  While the man was doing so silence again reigned, and the little room seemed full of uneasiness.  Only Valentine either was or affected to be nonchalant.  As soon as Wade had gone he said to the doctor: 

“This room is destined to be dedicated to strange uses, and to influence those who come within it.  Julian is not himself to-night.”

“Are you?” Julian asked.

“Myself?”

“Yes.”

“My dear Julian, we shall be forced to think the absinthe has been at work too busily in your brain.  What is the matter?”

“Nothing.”

“One would think we had been having a sitting, you are so excited.”

Julian suddenly drew his breath sharply, as if struck by a shot of an idea.

“Let us have one,” he cried.

The distant bells rang faintly.  The doctor thrilled to the suggestion, still bound by magic, surely.  For now, since the inspiring exclamation of Cuckoo, which had broken his theories on the wheel and swept his reason like a dead flower along the wind, he no longer condemned, as a danger only, that which had produced the trance from which, as from a strange prison, had come the new Valentine.  The former sitting had, it seemed, beckoned that trance, and with the trance had beckoned an incredibly evil and powerful thing.  What if that which had the power to give had also the power to take away?  Often it is so in ordinary conditions of life.  Why not also in extraordinary conditions?  So his thoughts ran, fantastically enough, to the sound of the far-off bells.

“A good notion,” he said on the spur of the moment and this quick reflection.

“You think so?” said Valentine.  “You who condemned us, even wrung a promise from us against sitting.”

His regard was suspicious.

“Perhaps I have changed my mind.  Perhaps I take the matter less seriously,” said the doctor.

He had never been more near lying, nor was he ashamed of his dissimulation.  There are creatures against which we must, whatever our principles, take up the nearest weapon that comes to hand.  The doctor looked at Julian and at Valentine, and could have perjured himself a thousand times to wrest the one from the other.

“But Miss Bright is ill,” said Valentine.

“No, I ain’t.  I’m all right now,” Cuckoo said.

She did not understand what was being proposed, but she gathered that the doctor desired it.  That was enough for her.  Valentine looked at them all three with eyes that plainly betokened a busy mind, then a smile flickered over his lips.  It was the smile of one in power watching his slaves creeping at their work—­for him.  He touched the point—­of which he had spoken earlier in the evening—­in that smile, a point of delirium.