“I beg your pardon, sir.”

The doctor said hastily to Julian: 

“These dogs will tear the person who has just come into the house to pieces if we don’t take care.  Catch on to Mab, Addison.”

Julian obeyed, and the dog was like live iron with determination under his grasp.

“Some one is with you, Lawler,” the doctor said.  “Does he wish to see me?”

“If you please, sir, it is Mr. Cresswell, Mr. Valentine come back for Mr. Addison.”

Julian felt himself go suddenly pale.

CHAPTER VI

THE STRENGTH OF THE SPRING

Rather reluctantly, Julian acted on the advice of Doctor Levillier and went out of town for a week on the following day.  He took his way to the sea, and tried to feel normal in a sailing-boat with a gnarled and corrugated old salt for his only companion.  But his success was only partial, for while his body gave itself to the whisper of the ungoverned breezes, while his hands held the ropes, and his eyes watched the subtle proceedings of the weather, and his ears listened to the serial stories of the waves, and to the conversational peregrinations of his Ancient Mariner about the China Seas in bygone days, his mind was still in London, still busily concerned itself with the very things that should now undergo a sea change and vanish in ozone.  Recent events oppressed him, to the occasional undoing of the old salt, well accustomed to the seasick reverence of his despairing clients on board the Star of the Sea.  When the mind of a man has once fallen into the habit of prancing in a circle like a circus horse, it is difficult to drive it back into the public streets, to make it trot serenely forward in its ordinary ways.  And Julian had with him a ring-master in the person of the ignorant Rip.  Whenever his eyes fell on Rip, curled uneasily in the bottom of the swinging boat, he went at a tangent back to Harley Street, and the strange finale of his evening with the doctor.

It had been a curious tableau divided by a door.  Levillier and he stood on one side tugging mightily at the intent mastiffs, which strained at their collars, dropping beads of foam from their grinning jaws, savages, instead of calm companions.  On the other side, in the hall, Lawler and Valentine paused in amazement, and a colloquy shot to and fro through the wooden barrier.  On hearing the name of Valentine mentioned by the butler, the doctor had cast an instant glance of unbounded amazement upon Julian.  And Julian had returned it, feeling in his heart the dawning of an inexplicable trouble.

“Is anything the matter?” Valentine’s voice had asked.

“No,” said the doctor in reply.  “But please go into the dining-room.  We will come to you there.  And Lawler—­”

“Yes, sir.”

“When you have shown Mr. Cresswell to the dining-room, be careful to shut the door, and to keep it shut till I come.”