“Yes.”

“And you know what I think.”

“Do I?”

“Yes, that it is a mere chimera.  But my opinion on such a subject has no particular value.  The doctor is different.  He is a great specialist.  The nerves have been his constant study for years.  If this vision continues to haunt you, you really ought to put yourself definitely into his hands.”

“Perhaps I will,” said Julian.

He spoke rather seriously and meditatively.  Valentine, possibly because he was in the sort of peculiarly irritable frame of mind that will sometimes cause a man to dislike having his tendered advice taken, seemed additionally vexed by this reply, or at any rate struck by it.  He paused in his walk, and seemed for an instant as if he were going to say something sharply sarcastic.  Then suddenly he laughed.

“After all,” he exclaimed in a calmer voice, “we are taking an absurdity mighty seriously.”

But Julian would not agree to this view of the matter.

“I don’t know that we are,” he said.

“You don’t know!”

“That is an absurdity.  No, Valentine, I don’t; I can’t think that it is.  I saw it in Cuckoo’s eyes only once, and that was—­just—­”

“Tell me just when you saw it.”

The words came from Valentine’s lips with a pressure, a hurry almost of anxiety.  He seemed curiously eager about the history of this chimera.  But Julian, eager too, and engrossed in thoughts that moved as yet in a maze full of vapors and of mists, did not find time to notice it.

“I noticed it just after, or when, she was begging me to go home.”

“Like a good boy,” Valentine hastily interposed.  “Because her jealousy prompted her to hate the thought of your having any pleasure in which she did not share.  Oh, you noticed the flame then.  Did it, too, tell you to go home?”

He spoke rather harshly and flippantly, and apparently put the question without desire of an answer, and rather with the intention of ridicule than for any other reason.  But Julian took it seriously and replied to it.

“Somehow I felt as if, perhaps, it did wish to speak some message to me, and that the message came, or might come, through her.”

He spoke slowly, for indeed it was this action of words that was beginning to make clear to himself his own impression, so vague and so unpresentable before.  As he thus traced it out, like a man following the blurred letters of an old inscription with the point of his stick, and gradually coming at their meaning, his excitement grew.  He said, speaking with a rising emphasis of conviction: 

“I’m not a mere fool.  There is—­there is something in all this; I feel it; I cannot be simply imagining.  There is something.  But I’m like a man in the dark.  I can’t see what it is; I can’t tell.  But you, Valentine, you, with your nature, so much better than I am, with so much deeper an insight, how is it you don’t see this flame?  Unless,”—­and here Julian struck his hand violently on the table,—­“unless it comes, as it seemed to come that night in the darkness, from you.  If it’s part of yourself—­but then”—­and his manner clouded again—­“how can that be?”