The doctor began to feel that his own powers were being strenuously attacked.  Inertia grew in his body.  He sat almost like one paralyzed.  His limbs, at first heavy as if loaded with intolerable weights, gradually became numb, until he was no longer aware of them.  He seemed to be merely a live mind poised there in the darkness, striving against the power that sought to sweep from its path all those that fought against it or dared, however feebly, to resist it.  But his mind, poised thus in this strange circle of slumber, came by imperceptible degrees to have a grip upon the past.  Imitating the mind that is enclosed within a drowning body, it gazed upon the wildly flitting pictures of the years that were gone.  Regent Street by night rose up before it.  The doctor saw, painted upon the background of the dense gloom in which they sat, the huge and vacant thoroughfare in the last watch of the night.  Faint figures wandered here and there, or paused beneath the shadow of the tall blind houses, assuming postures of fatigue or of leering and attentive evil.  But one moved onward steadily, scarcely glancing to the right or to the left.  The doctor’s mind, watching, knew that this moving figure was himself, and, as if with bodily eyes, he marked its course down the long vista of the dim street until it passed into more private ways of the town.  It passed into more private ways, but not alone.  A shadow followed it, and the face of the shadow was turned away.  The doctor could not see it, but there rose in him the horror and the fear which had attacked him long ago, when he turned to pursue the thing that dogged him in the darkness.  And he saw the shadow waver, pause, then turn to flee.  And as it turned he thought that it had the soul, though not the face, of the new Valentine.  Then suddenly a great anger against himself was born in him.  Why had he been so blind, so deceived?  He might have protected Julian.  But he, too, had been a foolish victim of outward beauty, the prey of the glory of a face.  He had not read the book of the heart.  And other pictures succeeded this vision of the streets and of the shadows that walk in them by night.  He saw Valentine singing while he and Julian listened.  And the eyes of Valentine were as the eyes of a saint, but now he knew that behind them crouched a soul that was filled with evil.  Slowly the air grew heavy.  Slumber paced in the tiny room.  The doctor struggled against it.  But the colours of the brain-pictures faded.  He saw them still, but only as one sees the world in a fog; looming forms that have lost their true character, that have assumed a vagueness of mystery, outlines at once heavy and remote, suggestive yet indefinite.  And still the spirit of sleep keep vigil by Cuckoo.

* * * * *

There was a slight hoarse cry in the night.

“What is that?” Valentine said, sharply.

There was no reply.  The doctor could have told him that the cry came from Julian, and that the lady of the feathers, leaning low in her chair, had passed from consciousness into insensibility.