And so he kept an attentive and hopeful vigil, his eyes always upon Valentine’s face, his hand always touching Valentine’s.  Already life seemed blossoming anew with an inexplicable radiance.  Valentine would speak once more, would come back from this underworld of the senses.  And Julian’s hand closed on his cold hand with a warm, impulsive strength, as if it might be possible to draw him back physically to consciousness and to speech.  But there was no answer.  And again Julian was assailed with doubts.  Yet the dog slept on happily, a hostage to peace.

Julian never knew how long that vigil lasted.  It might have been five minutes, or a lifetime.  The vehemence of his mental debate slew his power of observation of normal things.  He forgot what he was waiting for.  He forgot to expect Dr. Levillier.  Two visions alternated in glaring contrast before the eyes of his brain—­life with Valentine, and life without him.  It is so we watch the trance, or death,—­we know not which,—­of those whom we love, with a greedy, beautiful selfishness.  They are themselves only in relation to us.  They live, they die, in that wonderful relation.  To live is to be with us; to die, to go away from us.  There are women who love so much that they angrily expostulate with the dying, as if indeed the dying deliberately elected to depart out of their arms.  Do we not all feel at moments the “You could stay with me, if only you had the will!” that is the last bitter cry of despairing affection?  Julian, sitting there, while Valentine lay silent and the dog slept by his breast, saw ever and ever those two lives, flashing and fading like lamps across a dark sea, life with, life without, him.  The immensity of the contrast, the millions of airy miles between those two life-worlds, appalled him, for it revealed to him what mighty issues of joy and grief hung upon the almost visionary thin thread of one little life.  It is ghastly to be so idiotically dependent.  Yet who, at some time, is not?  And those who are independent lose, by their power, their possible Paradise.  But such a time of uncertainty as that which Julian must now endure is a great penalty to pay for even the greatest joy, when the joy is past.  He had his trance of the mind.  He was hypnotized by his ignorance whether Valentine were alive or dead.  And so he sat motionless, making the tour of an eternity of suffering, of wonder, of doubt, and hope, and yet, through it all, in some strange, indefinite way, numb, phlegmatic, and actually stupid.

At last the bell rang.  Dr. Levillier had arrived.  He was struck at once by Julian’s heaviness of manner.

“What is it?  What is the matter?” he asked.

“I don’t know.  You tell me.”

“He is fainting—­unconscious?”

“Unconscious, yes.”

They were in the little hall now.  Doctor Levillier narrowly scrutinized Julian.  For a moment he thought Julian had been drinking, and he took him by the arm.