Dr. Levillier sat lower in his chair, and they smoked in silence, both of them revelling in the warm peace and the ease of this night-hour.  Since he had come into the Harley Street house Julian had been much happier.  His perturbation had gradually evaporated until now scarcely a vestige of it remained.  The little doctor’s talk, above all the sight of his calm, thoughtful face and the aspect of his calm, satisfied room, gave the coup de grâce to the uneasiness of a spurious and ill-omened excitement.  When the power of wide medical knowledge is joined to the power of goodness and of umbrageous intellectuality, a doctor is, among all men, the man to lay the ghosts that human nature is perpetually at the pains to set walking in their shrouds to cause alarm.  All Julian’s ghosts were laid.  He smoked on and grew to feel perfectly natural and comfortable.  The dogs echoed and emphasized all the healing power of their small and elderly master.  As they lay sleeping, a tangle of large limbs and supine strength, the fire shone over them till their fawn-coloured coats gleamed almost like satin touched with gold.  The delightful sanctity of unmeasured confidence, unmeasured satisfaction, sang in their gentle and large-hearted snores, which rose and fell with the regularity of waves of the sea.  Now and then one of them slowly stretched a leg or expanded the toes of a foot, as if intent on presenting a larger surface of sensation to the embrace of comfort and of affection.  And they, so it seemed to Julian, kept the pleasant silence now come into existence between him and the doctor alive.  That silence rested him immensely.  In it the two cigars diminished steadily, steadily as the length of a man’s life, but glowing to the very end.  And the grey ashes dropped away of their own accord, and Julian’s mind shed its grey ashes too and glowed serenely.  The dogs expanded their warm bodies on the hearth, and his nature expanded in a vague, wide-stretching generosity of mute evening emotion.

“How comfortable this is, doctor,” he murmured at last.

“Yes.  It’s a good hour,” the doctor replied, letting the words go slowly from his lips.  “I wish I could give to all the poor creatures in this city just one good hour.”

They smoked their cigars out.

“I ought to go,” Julian said lazily.

“No.  Have one more.  I know it is dangerous to prolong a pleasure.  It loses its savour.  But I think, Addison, to-night, you and I can get no harm from the experiment.”

He handed Julian the cigar-box.

“We won’t stir up the dogs for another half-hour,” he added, looking at their happiness with a shining satisfaction.  “Here are the matches.  Light up.”

Julian obeyed, and they began the delightful era of the second cigar, and sank a little deeper down, surely, into serenity and peace.  Occasional coals dropping into the fender with a hot tick, tick, chirrupped a lullaby to the four happy companions.  And the men learnt a fine silence from the fine silence of the dogs.