An idea, suggested by Julian’s last remark, suddenly struck him.

“He conveyed a strong impression of evil, you say?”

“Yes.”

“How?  In what way, exactly?”

Julian hesitated.

“It’s difficult to say,” he answered.  “Awfully difficult to put such a thing into words.  He interested me.  I felt that he had a great power of intellect, or of will, or something.  But in every way he suggested a bad, a damnably bad, character.  A woman said to me once about him that it was like an emanation.”

“Ah!”

The doctor finished his gruel and put down the basin on the table beside him.

“By the way, where did Marr live?  Anywhere in my direction?  Would he, for instance, go home from Piccadilly, or the theatres, by Regent Street?”

“I don’t know at all where he lived.”

“Have you ever seen him with animals,—­with dogs, for instance?”

“No.”

“If he had been as evil as you suppose, any dog would have avoided him.”

“Well, but dogs avoid perfection too.”

“Hardly, Addison.”

“But Rip and Valentine!”

The remark struck the doctor; that was obvious.  He pushed his right foot slowly backwards and forwards on Rupert’s back, rucking up the dog’s loose skin in heavy folds.

“Yes,” he said; “Rip is rather an inexplicable beggar.  But do you mean to tell me he hasn’t got over his horror of Valentine to-day?”

“This afternoon he was worse than ever.  If Valentine had touched him, I believe he would have gone half mad.  I had to put him out of the room.”

“H’m!”

“Isn’t it unaccountable?”

“I must say that it is.  Dogs are such faithful wretches.  If Rupert and Mab were to turn against me like that I believe it would strike at my heart more fiercely than the deed of any man could.”

He bent down and ran his hand over Rupert’s heaving back.

“The cheap satirist,” he said, “is forever comparing the fickleness of men with the faithfulness of animals, but I don’t mean to do that.  I have a great belief in some human natures, and there are many men whom I could, and would, implicitly trust.”

“There is one, doctor, whom we both know.”

“Cresswell.  Yes.  I could trust him through thick and thin.  And yet his own dog flies at him.”

Doctor Levillier returned to that fact, as if it puzzled him so utterly that he could not dismiss it from his mind.

“There must be some curious, subtle reason for that,” he said; “yet with all my intimate and affectionate knowledge of dogs I cannot divine it.  Watch Rip carefully when he is not with Cresswell.  Look after his health.  Notice if he seems natural and happy.  Does he eat as usual?”

“Rather.  He did to-day.”

“And he seems contented with you?”

“Quite.”

“Well, all I can say is, that Rip doesn’t seem to possess a dog nature.  He is uncanny.”