"It is utterly gone now, thank God. I say, we have resolved that we won't sit again, haven't we?" "Yes; and what you have just told me makes me hate the whole thing. The game seems a game no longer." When the door had closed upon Julian, Valentine sat down and wrote a note. He addressed it to-- "Doctor Hermann Levillier, "Harley Street, W.," and laid it on his writing-table, so that it might be posted early the next morning. CHAPTER VI A CONVERSATION AT THE CLUB Doctor Levillier was not a materialist, although he concerned himself much with the functions of the body, and with that strange spider's web of tingling threads which we call the nervous system. The man who sweeps out the temple, who polishes the marble steps and dusts the painted windows, may yet find time to bend in prayer before the altars he helps to keep beautiful, may yet find a heart to wonder at the spirit which the temple holds as an envelope holds a letter. Reversing the process of mind which seems to lead so many medical students to atheism, Dr. Levillier had found that the more he understood the weaknesses, the nastinesses, the dreary failures, the unimaginable impulses of the flesh, the more he grew to believe in the existence, within it, of the soul. One day a worn-out dyspeptic, famous for his intellectual acquirements over two continents, sat with the little great doctor in his consulting-room. The author, with dry, white lips, had been recounting a series of sordid symptoms, and, as the recital grew, their sordidness seemed suddenly to strike him with a mighty disgust.