“My dear doctor,” he said, “what a pandemonium!  I nearly came to your assistance.”

“It’s very lucky you didn’t, Cresswell,” the doctor answered, almost grimly.

“Why?”

“Because if you had you might chance to be a dead man by this time.”

Out on the sea, under the streaming clouds that fled before the wind, Julian recalled the strange terseness of that reply, and the perhaps stranger silence that followed it.  For Valentine had made no comment, had asked for no explanation.  He had simply dropped the subject, and the three men had remained together for a few minutes, constrained and ill at ease.  Then the doctor had said: 

“Let us go back now to my room.”

Valentine and he assented, and got upon their feet to follow him, but when he opened the door there came up from the servants’ quarters the half-strangled howling of the mastiffs.  Involuntarily Dr. Levillier paused to listen, his hand behind his ear.  Then he turned to the young men, and held out his right hand.

“Good-night,” he said.  “I must go down to them, or there will be a summons applied for against me in the morning by one of my neighbours.”

And they let themselves out while he retreated once more down the stairs.

The drive home had been a silent one.  Only when Julian was bidding Valentine good-night had he found a tongue to say to his friend: 

“The devil’s in all this, Valentine.”

And Valentine had merely nodded with a smile and driven off.

Now, in the sea solitude that was to be a medicine to his soul, Julian went round and round in his mental circus, treading ever the same saw dust under foot, hearing ever the same whip crack to send him forward.  His isolation bent him upon himself, and the old salt’s hoarse murmurings of the “Chiney” seas in no way drew him to a healthier outlook.  Why Valentine returned for him that night he did not know.  That might have been merely the prompting of a vagrant impulse.  Julian cursed that impulse, on account of the circumstances to which it directly led; for there was a peculiar strain of enmity in them which had affected, and continued to affect, him most disagreeably.  To behold the instinctive hostility of another towards a person whom one loves is offensively grotesque to the observer, and at moments Julian hated the doctor’s mastiffs, and even hated the unconscious Rip, who lay, in a certain shivering discomfort and apprehension, seeking sleep with the determination of sorrow.  There are things, feelings, and desires, which should surely be kicked out of men and dogs.  Such a thing, beyond doubt, was a savage hatred of Valentine.  What prompted it, and whence it came, were merely mysteries, which the dumbness of dogs must forever sustain.  But what specially plunged Julian into concern was the latent fear that Dr. Levillier might echo the repulsion of his dogs and come to look upon Valentine with different eyes.  Julian’s