Gaining no reply to his call, Julian grew alarmed.  He sprang up from the table and turned on the electric light.  Valentine was leaning back nervelessly in his chair.  His face was quite pale and cold.  His lips were slightly parted.  His eyes were wide open and stared before him without expression.  His head hung far back over the edge of his chair.  He looked exactly like a man who had just died, and died in a convulsion.  For though the lips were parted, the teeth set tightly together grinned through them, and the hands were intensely contracted into fists.  Julian seized Valentine in his arms, lifted the drooping body from the chair and laid it out at length on the divan.  He put a pillow under the head, which fell on it grotesquely and lay sideways, still smiling horribly at nothing.  Then he poured out a glass of brandy and strove to force some of it between Valentine’s teeth, dashed water in the glaring eyes, beat the air with a fan which he tore from the mantelpiece.  All was in vain.  There came no sign of returning life.  Then Julian caught Valentine’s hands in his and sought to unclench the rigid, cold fingers.  He laid his hand on the heart of his friend.  No pulsation beat beneath his anxious touch.  Then a great horror overtook him.  Suddenly he felt a conviction that Valentine had died beside him in the dark, had died sitting up in his chair by the table.  The cry he had heard, so thin, so strange and piercing, the attenuated flame that he had seen, were the voice and the vision of the flying soul which he had loved, seeking its final freedom, en route to the distant spheres believers dream of and sceptics deny.

“Valentine!  Valentine!” he cried again, with the desperate insistence of the hopeless.  But the cold, staring creature upon the green divan did not reply.  With a brusque and fearful movement Julian shut the eyelids.  Would they ever open again?  He knelt upon the floor, leaning passionately over his friend, or that which had been his friend.  He bent his head down on the silent breast, listening.  Surely if Valentine were alive he would show it by some sign, the least stir, breath, shiver, pulse.  There was none.  Julian might have been clasping stone or iron.  If he could only know for certain whether Valentine were really dead.  Yet he dared not leave him alone and go to seek aid.  Suddenly a thought struck him.  In the hall of the flat was a handle which, when turned in a certain direction, communicated with one of those wooden and glass hutches in which sleepy boy-messengers harbour at night.  Julian sprang to this handle, set the communicator in motion, then ran back into the tentroom.  His intention was to write a note to Dr. Levillier.  The writing-table was so placed that, sitting at it, his back would be turned to that silent figure on the divan.  A shiver ran over him at the bare thought of such a blind posture.  No, he must face that terror, once so dear.  He caught up a pen and a sheet of note paper, and, swerving round, was about to write, holding the paper on his knee, when the electric bell rang.  The boy had been very quick in his run from the hutch.  Julian laid down the paper and went to let the boy in.  His knees shook as he descended the dark, echoing stairs and opened the door.  There stood the messenger, a rosy-faced urchin of about twelve, with rather sleepy brown eyes.