In the silence Dr. Levillier and Julian gazed at him, and he seemed a mystery to them both, a strange enigma of purity and of unearthliness.

“Good-bye, Cresswell,” Levillier said at last.

“Good-bye, doctor.”

“Good-bye, Valentine.”

Julian held out his hand to grasp his friend’s, but Valentine began looping up the curtain and did not take it.  In his gentlest voice he said to Julian: 

“Good-bye, dear Julian, good-bye.  The dawn is on our friendship, Julian.”

“Yes, Valentine.”

Valentine added, after a moment of apparent reflection: 

“Take Rip away with you just for to-night.  I don’t want to be bitten in my sleep.”

And when Julian went away, the little dog eagerly followed him, pressing close to his heels, so close that several times Julian could not avoid kicking him.

As soon as the flat door had closed on his two friends, Valentine walked down the passage to the drawing-room, which was shrouded in darkness.  He entered it without turning on the light, and closed the door behind him.  He remained in the room for perhaps a quarter of an hour.  At length the door opened again.  He emerged out of the blackness.  There was a calm smile on his face.  Two of his fingers were stained with blood, and to one a fragment of painted canvas adhered.

When Valentine’s man-servant went into the room in the morning and drew up the blinds, he found, to his horror, the picture of “The Merciful Knight” lying upon the floor.  The canvas hung from the gold frame in shreds, as if rats had been gnawing it.

CHAPTER II

THE PICCADILLY EPISODE

Doctor Levillier and Julian bade each other good-bye on the doorstep.  The doctor hailed a hansom, but Julian preferred to walk.  He wished to be alone, to feel the cold touch of the air on his face.  The dawn was indeed just breaking, ever so wearily.  A strong wind came up with it over the housetops, and Victoria Street looked dreary in the faint, dusky, grey light, which grew as slowly in the cloudy sky as hope in a long-starved heart.  Julian lived in Mayfair, and he now walked forward slowly towards Grosvenor Place, making a deliberate detour for the sake of exercising his limbs.  He was glad to be out under the sky, glad to feel the breeze on his face, and to be free from the horror of that little room in which he had kept so appalling a vigil.  The dull lines of the houses stretching away through the foggy perspective were gracious to his eyes.  His feet welcomed the hard fibre of the pavement.  They had learned in that night almost to shudder at the softness of a thick carpet.  And all his senses began to come out of their bondage and to renew their normal sanity.  Only now did Julian realize how strenuous that bondage had been, a veritable slavery of the soul.  Such a slavery could surely only have been possible within the four walls of a building.