Van Beers and Dégas, Chaplin and Gustav Courbet, while above the mantelpiece, where once had hung “The Merciful Knight,” a Cocotte by Leibl smoked a pipe into the room.  It seemed incredible that Valentine could be at rest in such a livid chamber, and not even the vague communications of Cuckoo woke in the doctor such a definite and alive sensation of discomfort as this vision of outward change that must surely betoken an inward transformation of the most vivid and unusual kind.  And everywhere, as a deep and monotonous bell ringing relentlessly through a symphony of discordant and crying passions, there sounded that sinister note of deep and dusty red.  Despite his own complete health of mind, and the frantic disquisitions of the morbid Nordau, the little doctor felt as if he heard the colour, as if it spoke from beneath his very feet, as if it sang under his fingers when he laid them on the brocade of a couch, as if the room palpitated with a heavy music which murmured drowsily in his ears a monotonous song of dull and weary change.  No silence had ever before spoken to him so powerfully.  He was greatly affected, and did not scruple to show his discomfort to Wade, who waited respectfully by the door.

“What an alteration!” he said again, but in a lower and more withdrawn voice.  “I cannot recognize the room I once knew—­and loved!”

“Mr. Valentine has been doing it up, sir.”

“But why, Wade; why?”

“I don’t know, sir; a fancy, I suppose, sir.”

“An evil one,” the doctor murmured to himself.

He glanced at Wade.  It struck him that the man’s mind might possibly march with Cuckoo’s in detection of his master’s transformation, if transformation there were.  Wade returned the doctor’s glance with calm, good breeding.

“Mr. Valentine is well, I hope, Wade?” he said.

“Very well, sir, I believe.”

“And Mr. Addison?”

“I couldn’t quite say, sir, as to that.”

“Do you mean that he looks ill?”

“I couldn’t say, sir.  Mr. Julian don’t look quite what he was, to my view, sir.”

“Oh.”

The butler’s level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and again a prophetic chord of change was struck.

“Thank you, Wade” said the doctor.

The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room.

* * * * *

Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose nerves played him tricks.  He was, above all things, sane, both in mind and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation.  Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was, perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by the action of the imagination.  Half, at least, of his great