He was greatly affected, and did not scruple to show his discomfort to Wade, who waited respectfully by the door. "What an alteration!" he said again, but in a lower and more withdrawn voice. "I cannot recognize the room I once knew--and loved!" "Mr. Valentine has been doing it up, sir." "But why, Wade; why?" "I don't know, sir; a fancy, I suppose, sir." "An evil one," the doctor murmured to himself. He glanced at Wade. It struck him that the man's mind might possibly march with Cuckoo's in detection of his master's transformation, if transformation there were. Wade returned the doctor's glance with calm, good breeding. "Mr. Valentine is well, I hope, Wade?" he said. "Very well, sir, I believe." "And Mr. Addison?" "I couldn't quite say, sir, as to that." "Do you mean that he looks ill?" "I couldn't say, sir. Mr. Julian don't look quite what he was, to my view, sir." "Oh." The butler's level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and again a prophetic chord of change was struck. "Thank you, Wade" said the doctor. The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room. * * * * * Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose nerves played him tricks. He was, above all things, sane, both in mind and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation. Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was, perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by the action of the imagination. Half, at least, of his great success in life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity. No man, in fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he. Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there. The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded chamber. The hour was quiet. No fire danced in the grate. Doctor Levillier leaned back in his low chair with the intention of composedly awaiting Valentine's return. But the composure which had already been slightly shaken by the visit of the lady of the feathers, and by the words of Wade, was destined to be curiously upset by the motionless vision of the empty room.