“Yes, yes.”

“And humming passions that come to you and lift you from your feet?”

“You know I do.”

“But I never knew before that they might lift you towards heaven.  That’s the thing.  I have thought that the exercise of the passions dragged a man down; but why should it be so?  I have talked of men wallowing in the mire.  I must find out whether I have been lying when I said that.  Julian, this spring, you and I will see the world, at any rate, with open eyes.  We will watch the budding and blossoming of the souls around us, the flowers in the garden of life.  We will not be indifferent or afraid.  I have been a coward in my ice prison of refinement.  I keep a perpetual season of winter round me.  I know it.  I know it to-night.”

Julian did not speak.  He was carried away by this outburst, which gained so much, and so strange, force by its issue from the lips and from the heart of Valentine.  But he was carried away as a weak swimmer by a resistless torrent, and instinctively he seemed to be aware of danger and to be stretching out his arms for some rock or tree-branch to stay his present course.  Perhaps Valentine noticed this, for his excitement suddenly faded, and his face resumed its usual expression of almost cold purity and refinement.

“I generally translate this sort of thing into music,” he said.

At the last word Julian looked up instinctively to the wall on which the picture of “The Merciful Knight” usually hung.  For Valentine’s music was inseparably connected in his mind with that picture.  His eyes fell on a gap.

“Val,” he exclaimed, in astonishment, “what’s become of—­”

“Oh, ‘The Merciful Knight’?  It has gone to be cleaned.”

“Why?  It was all right, surely?”

“No.  I found it wanted cleaning badly and I am having it reframed.  It will be away for some time.”

“You must miss it.”

“Yes, very much.”

The last words were spoken with cutting indifference.

CHAPTER VII

JULIAN VISITS THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS

From that night, and almost imperceptibly, the relations existing between Valentine and Julian slightly changed.  It seemed to Julian as if a door previously shut in his friend’s soul opened and as if he entered into this hitherto secret chamber.  He found there an apparent strange humanity which, as he grew accustomed to it, warmed him.  The curious refined saintliness of Valentine, almost chilly in its elevation, thawed gently as the days went by, but so gently that Julian scarcely knew it, could scarcely define the difference which nevertheless led him to alter his conduct almost unconsciously.  One great sameness, perhaps, gave him a sensation of safety and of continuity.  Valentine’s face still kept its almost unearthly expression of intellectuality and of purity.  When Julian looked at him no passions flamed in his blue