“Heart disease?”

“I don’t know.  There is going to be an inquest.”

“When did he die?”

“Last night, or rather at four in the morning; just as Valentine came out of his trance, it must have been.  Don’t you remember the clock striking?”

“Certainly, I do.  But why do you connect the two circumstances?”

“Doctor, how can you tell that I do?”

“By your expression, the tone of your voice.”

“You are right.  Somehow I can’t help connecting them.  I told Valentine so to-night.  He has been with me to see Marr’s body.”

“You have just come from that deathbed now?”

“Yes.”

Julian sketched rapidly the events of the European Hotel, but he left to the last the immense impression made upon him by the expression of the dead man.

“He looked so happy, so good, that at first I could not recognize him,” he said.  “His face, dead, was the most absolutely direct contradiction possible of his face, alive.  He was not the same man.”

“The man was gone, you see, Addison.”

“Yes.  But, then, what was it which remained to work this change in the body?”

“Death gives a strange calm.  The relaxing of sinews, the droop of limbs and features, the absolute absence of motion, of breathing, work up an impression.”

“But there was something more here,—­more than peace.  There was a—­well, a strong happiness and a goodness.  And Marr had always struck me as an atrociously bad lot.  I think I told you.”

The doctor sat musing.  Lawler came in with the tray, on which was a small basin of gruel and soda-water bottles, a decanter of whisky, and a tall tumbler.  Julian mixed himself a drink, and the doctor, still meditatively, took the basin of gruel onto his knees.  As he sipped it, he looked a strange, little, serious ascetic, sitting there in the light from the wax candles, his shining boots planted gently on the broad back of the slumbering mastiff, his light eyes fixed on the fire.  He did not speak again until he was half way through his gruel.  Then he said: 

“And you know absolutely nothing of Marr’s past history?”

“No; nothing.”

“I gather from all you have told me that it would be worthy of study.  If I knew it I might understand the startling change from the aspect of evil to the aspect of good at death.  I believe the man must have been far less evil than you thought him, for dead faces express something that was always latent, if not known, in the departed natures.  Ignorantly, you possibly attributed to Marr a nature far more horrible than he ever really possessed.”

But Julian answered: 

“I feel absolutely convinced that at the time I knew him he was one of the greatest rips, one of the most merciless men in London.  I never felt about any man as I did about him!  And he impressed others in the same way.”

“I wish I had seen him,” Doctor Levillier said.