“What have you got to say about Cresswell?” he asked curtly.

“My dear chap, now don’t you get your frills out.  Nothing that I should mind being said about me, I assure you.  Only Cresswell will soon lose his nickname if he goes on as he’s going now.”

“I’m in the dark.”

“That’s what he likes being, if what they say is true.  Quite a night-bird, I’m told.”

“You’d better be more explicit.”

But the man glanced at Julian’s face and seemed to think better of it.  He moved off muttering: 

“Damned rot, minding a little chaff.  And when we’re all in the same boat too.”

Julian sat pondering over his veiled remarks.  They surprised him, but at first he was inclined to consider them as meaningless and unfounded as so much of the gossip of the clubs.  Men like Valentine must always be a target for the arrows of the cynical.  Julian had heard his sanctity laughed at in billiard-rooms and in bars many times, and had simply felt an easy contempt for the laughers, who could not understand that any nature could be finer than their own.  But to-day his own faint change of life—­as yet in its gentle beginnings—­led him presently to wonder, literally for the first time, whether there was a side of Valentine’s life that was not merely a side of feeling, but of action, and that he knew nothing of.  If it were so, Julian felt an inward conviction that the very nearest weeks of the past had seen its birth.  He remembered once more Valentine’s idle remark about his weariness of goodness, and wondered whether—­in violation of his nature, in violent revolt against his own nobility—­he was living at last that commonplace, theatrical puppet-play of the world, a double life.

Valentine a night-bird!  What did that mean?

And then Julian thought of the great wheeling army of the bats, whose evolutions every night of creation witnesses.  In the day they do not sleep, but they are hidden.  Their wings are folded so closely as to be invisible.  Nobody could tell that they ever flew through shadowy places, seeking that which never satiates, although it may transform, the appetite.  Nobody could tell how the twilight affects them when it comes; how, in their obscurity, they have to keep a guard lest the involuntary fluttering of a half-spread pinion betray them.  And then when the twilight, the blessed one of the twin twilights, one in course towards day, one in course towards night, has deepened and has died, they can dare to be themselves, to spread their short wings, and to flutter on their vagrant and monotonous courses.  It is a great though secret army—­the army of the bats.  It scours through cities.  No weather will keep it quite restful in camp.  No darkness will blind it into immobility.  The mainspring of sin beats in it as drums beat in a Soudanese fantasia, as blood beats in a heart.  The air of night is black with the movement of the bats.  They fly so thickly round