The light in the room was dim, a carefully manufactured twilight.  It is strange how many things, and how slight, stir, control, influence in one direction or another, the emotions.  Light and the absence of light can divert a heart as easily as the pressing of a button can give a warship to the sea.  Twilight and music can change a beast into a man, a man into an angel, for the moment.  Long after that evening was dead, both Julian and Doctor Levillier anxiously, and in their different ways analytically, considered it.  They submitted it to a secret process of probing, such as many men enforce upon what they imagine to be great causes in their lives.  That hour became an hour of wonder, an hour of amazement, viewed in the illumination of subsequent events.  They found in it a curious climax of misunderstanding, a culmination of all deceptive things.

And yet, in that hour they only watched a young man of London, a modern intellectual youth, playing in a Victoria Street drawing-room upon a Steinway grand piano.

They were sitting sideways to Valentine, and a little behind him.  Therefore he could not easily see them unless he slightly turned his head.  But they could observe him, and, obeying Doctor Levillier’s mute injunction, Julian now did so.

Valentine was gazing straight before him over the top, of the piano, and his eyes seemed to be fixed upon the dim figure of Christ in the picture of “The Merciful Knight.”  Was he not playing to the picture, playing to that figure in it?  And did not his musical imagination seek to reproduce in sound the vision of the life of that mailed knight who never lived and died?  The purity of his expression, always consummate, was to-night more peculiar, more unearthly, than before in any place, at any moment.  And, as mere line can convey to the senses of man a conception of a great virtue or of a great vice, the actual shape of his features, thus seen in profile, was the embodiment of an exquisitely ascetic purity, as much an embodiment as is a drop of water pierced by a sunbeam.  This struck both Doctor Levillier and Julian, and the doctor was amazed anew at the silent decree that the invisible shall be made visible in forms comprehensible to the commonest minds.  Sin would surely flee from a temple sculptured in such a shape as the body of Valentine, as a vampire would flee from the bloodless courts of the heaven of the Revelation.  Lust cannot lie at ease on a crystal couch, or rest its dark head upon a pillow of pale ivory.  And the message of this strange, unearthly youth now given in music, and to the air and the dust—­for Valentine had lost knowledge of his friends—­was crystalline too.  In his improvisation he journeyed through many themes of varying characters.  He hymned the knight’s temptation no less than his triumph.  But purity was in the hymn even at the hour of temptation, and sang like a bird in every scene of the life,—­a purity classical, detached, so refined as to be almost physically cold.