“Ah! now I see.  You think that I—­”

“Might swing from a great height to an equally great depth.  That has been my experience—­that the man who is once extreme is always extreme, but not always in the same way.  The greatest libertines have made the greatest ascetics.  But, within my own experience, I have known the reverse process to obtain.  And you, if you changed, might carry Addison with you.”

“But then, doctor, you do believe in these manifestations?”

“Not necessarily.  But I believe that the minds of men are often very carefully, very deftly, poised, and that a little push can send them one way or the other.  Have you ever balanced one billiard-ball on the top of another?”

“Yes.”

“Then you know that a breath will upset it and send it rolling.  Be careful.  Your mind, your very nature, may be poised like that billiard-ball.  Addison’s may be the same.  Indeed, I feel sure Addison’s is.  That curious dread of you which overcame him at your last sitting is a sign of it.  The whole thing is wrong—­bad for body and for mind.”

“Perhaps.  Well, we have definitely agreed to give it up.”

“That’s well.  Eleven o’clock!  I must be going.  Are you doing anything to-morrow night?”

“No.”

“I have got a box for this new play at the Duke’s Theatre.  Will you come?”

“With pleasure.”

“I will ask Addison also.”

They put on their overcoats, and walked a little way along Pall Mall before they parted.  Near the Atheneaum they passed a tall, thin man, who was coming in the opposite direction.  He turned round as they went by, and stood directly regarding them till they were out of sight.

CHAPTER VII

THE REGENT STREET EPISODE

The things we do apparently by chance often have a curious applicability to the things we have thought.  John the Baptist was sent to prepare the way of the Lord.  These thoughts are the John the Baptists of the mind, and prepare the way for facts that often startlingly illustrate them.  It is as if our thoughts were gradually materialized by the action of the mind; as if, by the act of thinking, we projected them.

When Doctor Levillier got a box for the first night of the new play at the Duke’s Theatre, and when he invited Valentine and Julian to make up his party, he had no idea what the subject of the piece was, no notion that it would have anything to do with the conversation which took place between him and Valentine at the club.  But the plot applied with almost amazing fidelity to much that he had said upon that occasion.  The play was a modern allegory of the struggle between good and evil, which has been illustrated in so many different ways since the birth of the Faust legend.  But the piece had a certain curious originality which sprang from the daring of the author.  Instead of showing one result of the struggle, a good man