"Flames," the doctor whispered to himself. "Flames! The will, the soul of God in nature." PART V--FLAMES CHAPTER I VALENTINE INVITES HIS GUESTS Valentine and Julian sat together in the tentroom at night, as they sat together many months ago, when Julian confessed his secret and Valentine expressed his strange desire to have a different soul. Now it was deep winter. The year was old. In three days it must die. It lay in the snow, like some abandoned beggar waiting for the inevitable end. Some, who were happy, would fain have succoured it and kept it with them. Others, who were sad, said: "Let it go--this beggar. Already it has taken too many alms from us." But neither the happy nor the sad could affect its fate. So it lay in the snow and in the wind, upon its deathbed. The tentroom had not been altered. Still the green draperies, veiled walls, windows and door, meeting in a point at the ceiling. The fire danced and shone. The electric moons gleamed with a twilight softness. Only Rip was gone from the broad and cushioned divan upon which he had loved to lie, half sleeping, half awake, while his master talked and Julian listened or replied. The room was the same, and this very fact emphasized the transformation of the two men who sat in it. They leaned in their low chairs on each side of the fire, thinly veiled from time to time in cigarette-smoke. No sound of London reached them in this small room. Even the voice of the winter wind whispered and sang in vain. Stifled by the thick draperies, it failed in its effort to gain their attention, and sighed among the chimney-tops the chagrin of its soul. The face of Julian was drawn and heavy. His eyes were downcast. His arms hung over the cushioned elbows of his chair, in which he sat very low, in the shrivelled posture of one desperately fatigued. From time to time he opened his lips in a sort of dull gape, then shut his teeth tightly as if he ground them together. The drooping lids of his eyes were covered with little lines, and there were deeper lines at the corners of his mouth. The colour of his face was the colour of the misty cloud that haunts the steps of evening on an autumn day--grey, as if it clothed processes of decay and desolation. Years seemed to crouch upon him like lean dogs upon a doorstep. Within a few months he had stepped from boyhood to the creaking threshold of premature age.