ground as if with a tired reluctance, and his hands were fidgetty, yet nerveless. The eyes, that looked at the doctor and looked away by swift turns, burned with a haggard eagerness unutterably different from their former bright vivacity. Beneath them wrinkles crept on the puffy white face as worms about a corpse. Busy and tell-tale, they did not try to conceal the story of the body into which they had prematurely cut themselves. Nor did Julian's features choose to back up any reserve his mind might possibly feel about acknowledging the consummate alteration of his life. They proclaimed, as from a watch-tower, the arrival of enemies. The cheeks were no longer firm, but heavy and flaccid. The mouth was deformed by the down-drawn looseness of the sensualist, and the complexion beaconed with an unnatural scarlet that was a story to be read by every street-boy. Yet, even so, the doctor, as he looked pitifully and with a gnawing grief upon Julian, felt not the mysterious thrill communicated to him by Valentine. These two men, these old time friends of his, were both in a sense strangers. But it was as if he had at least heard much of Julian, knew much of him, understood him, comprehended exactly why he was a stranger. Valentine was the total stranger, the unknown, the undivined. Long ago the doctor had foreseen the possibility of the Julian who now stood before him. He had never foreseen the possibility of the new Valentine. The one change was summed up in an instant. The other walked in utter mystery. The doctor had been swift to notice Julian's furtive glance, and was equally swift in banishing all trace of surprise from his own manner. So they met with a fair show of cordiality, and Julian developed a little of his old cheerfulness. "Val's dressing," he said. "Well, there's plenty of time. By the way, how's your Russian, doctor?" "Better." "You've cured him! Bravo!" "I hope I have persuaded him to cure himself." Julian looked up hastily. "Oh, that sort of complaint, was it?" He laughed, not without a tinge of bitterness. "Perhaps he doesn't want to be cured." "I have persuaded him to want to be, I think." "Isn't that rather a priest's office?" Julian asked. The doctor noticed that a very faint hostility had crept into his manner. "Why?" "Oh, I don't know. Such an illness is a matter of temperament, I dare say, and the clergy tinker at our temperaments, don't they? while you doctors tinker at our bodies." "A nerve-doctor has as much to do with mind as body, and no doctor can possibly do much good if he entirely ignores the mind. But you know my theories." "Yes. They make you clergyman and doctor in one, a dangerous man." And he laughed again, jarringly, and shifted in his seat, looking around him with quick eyes. "What do you think of the room?" he said abruptly. "I think it entirely spoilt and ruined," the doctor answered gravely. "It's altered, certainly."