which he could not identify.
It is certain that he gradually became acutely aware of a stifling sense
of constraint, which he believed to be greatly intensified by the
surrounding darkness and silence. He wondered if Julian was conscious
of it also, and at moments longed to ask. But something held him back,
that curious something which we all feel at times like a strong hand
laid upon us. He made up his mind that this discomfort of his soul,
unreasonably considerable though it was, must be due solely to Julian's
abrupt demeanour and obvious desire to check his curiosity about
the drawing of the curtain. But, as the moments ran by, his sense of
uneasiness assumed such fantastic proportions that he began to cast
about for some more definite, more concrete, cause. At one instant he
found it in the condition of his health. The day had been damp and
dreary, and he had suffered from neuralgia. Doubtless the pain had
acted upon his nervous system, and was accountable for his present and
perpetually increasing anxiety. A little later he was fain to dismiss
this supposition as untenable. His sense of constraint was changing into
a positive dread, and not at all of Julian, around whom he had believed
that his thoughts were in flight. Something, he knew not at all what,
interposed between him and Julian, and so definitely that Valentine felt
as if he could have fixed the exact moment in which the interposition
had taken place, as one can fix the exact moment in which a person enters
a room where one is sitting. And the interposition was one of great
horror,--entirely malignant, Valentine believed.

He had an impulse to spring up from the table, to turn on the light,
and to say, "Let us make an end of this jugglery!" Yet he sat still,
wondering why he did so. A curiosity walked in his mind, pacing about
till he could almost fancy he heard its footsteps. He sat, then, as one
awaiting an arrival, that has been heralded in some way, by a telegram,
a message, a carrier-pigeon flown in at an open window. But the herald,
too, was horrible. What then would follow it? What was coming? Valentine
felt that he began to understand Marr's queer remark, "You are _en
route_." At the first sitting he had felt a very vague suggestion of
immoderate possibilities, made possibilities by the apparently futile
position assumed at a table by himself and Julian. To-night the vague
seemed on march towards the definite. Fancy was surely moving towards
fact