But this thawing of Julian, the quick response of humanity to the adroit treatment of it, only threw into harsher relief the immobility of Valentine, and to him the doctor drew no nearer, but seemed, with each moment, more distant, more absolutely divided from him.  And the gulf between them was full of icebergs, which filled the atmosphere with the breath of a deadly frost.  This was what the doctor felt.  What Valentine, the new Valentine, felt could not be ascertained.  He wore a brilliant mask, on whose gay mouth the society smile was singularly well painted.  He wore a manner edged with tinkling bells of brilliancy.  Happiness and ease beamed in his eyes.  Yet his look, his voice, his smile, his gaiety chilled the doctor and set him mentally shivering.  And with each bright saying and merry laugh he struck a blow upon the former friendship.  The doctor fancied he could actually hear the sound of the hammer at its work.

The simile of the hammer was peculiarly consonant with his present view of the new Valentine, for, despite the latter’s gaiety, ease, and self-possession, his smiling sociability and expansiveness, the doctor was perpetually conscious of a lurking violence, an incessant and forcible exigence in him.  It might be a fancy, but the doctor was not, as a rule, the prey of fancies.  Yet Valentine gave no outward hint of inward turmoil.  Rather did the doctor divine it as by a curious intuition that guided him to that which lay in hiding.  And it was this apprehension of a deep violence and peculiar, excessive animation in Valentine that woke the doctor’s deepest wonder, and set the gulf between them so widely.  For all violence had once been so specially abhorred by Valentine.  He had so loved and sought all calm.  The calm, he had often said, were the true aristocrats of life.  Fury and any wild movements of the passions were of the gutter.

That dinner was returned.  The doctor dined with Valentine and Julian more than once, and accompanied them to the theatre.  But he was unable to make certain of Valentine’s precise attitude towards Julian, although he saw easily that the influence of the one over the other had rather waxed than waned.  This being so, it followed that Julian, having completely changed, the influence that guided him must have completely changed also.  The pendulum had swung back.  That often happened in the record of men’s lives.  But not in such a way as this.  The doctor, like Cuckoo, recognized the existence of a mystery.  But he was by no means prepared to accept her fantastic and ignorantly vague explanation of it.  That was a wild fable, a fairy tale for a child, not a reasonable elucidation for a man and a doctor.  The most curious thing of all was that she declared that Valentine had actually told her the truth about the matter, knowing that she could not understand it.  The doctor resolved to see her later, and to question her more minutely on this point.  Meanwhile he began to