devoured his habitation, and was stirred into an ignorant and yet tumultuous passion.  As the madman, with a childish, increasing uneasiness, awed by the sinuous approach of the unseen fire, might pace to and fro, round and round about his cell, so it seemed to this poised, watching faculty of Valentine that his soul wandered in its confined cell of the body, at first with the cushioned softness of an animal, moving mechanically, driven by an endless and unmeaning restlessness, then with an increasing energy, a fervour, a crescendo of endeavour.  What drove his soul?  Surely it was struggling with an unseen power.  And the steady diminuendo of his bodily forces continued, until he was a corpse in which a fury dwelt.  That fury was the soul.  He had a strange fancy that he, unlike all the rest of humanity, would die, yet still retain his spirit in its fleshy prison, and that the spirit screamed and fought to be free on its wayward pilgrimage to heaven or hell.  All its brother and sister spirits had fled, since the beginnings of time, from their bodies at the crisis of dissolution, had gone to punishment or to reward.  His soul alone was to meet a different fate, was to be confined in a decaying body, to breathe physical corruption, and to be at home in a crumbling dwelling to which no light, no air, could ever penetrate.  And the soul, which knows instinctively its eternal mêtier, rebelled with a fantastic violence.  And still, ever, the body died.  The pulses ceased from beating.  The warm blood was mixed with snow until it grew cold and gradually congealed in the veins.  The little door of the heart swung slower and slower upon its hinges, more feebly—­more feebly.  And then there came a supreme moment.  The soul of Valentine, with a frantic vehemence, beat down at last its prison door, and, even as his body died, escaped with a cry through the air.

* * * * *

“Valentine, did you hear that strange cry?”

* * * * *

“Valentine, what was it?  I never heard any sound like that before, so thin and small, and yet so horribly clear and piercing; neither like the cry of a child nor of an animal, nor like the wail that could come from any instrument.  Valentine, now I see a little flame come from where you are sitting.  It’s so tiny and faint.  Don’t you see it?  It is floating toward me.  Now it is passing me.  It’s beyond.  It’s going.  There, it has vanished.  Valentine!  Valentine!”

BOOK II—­JULIAN

CHAPTER I

THE TRANCE