Yes, he
had even thought of Valentine as a stranger, and said to himself, "Where,
then, is my friend?" The new Valentine had risen out of the ashes of
sleep. Julian pressed forward the sitting as a means, the only one, of
searching among these ashes. In the old days each sitting had quickened
his senses into a strange life, as the last sitting quickened the senses
of the doctor. But to Julian this last sitting brought nothing but
disappointment; the thing which had been alive was dead, and so the
sudden hope which had come with the new wonder died too. He supposed
that he had been the prey of an absurd fancy created by the idle words
of the doctor, or by an idiotic movement of his mind, which had cried
to him on a sudden: "If the Valentine you love and revere is really gone
away, what are you worshipping now?" Now, in his heavy disappointment he
thought of this cry as a mad exclamation, and he sought to drown all
memory of it, and every memory in fresh vices, and in his fatal habit
of absinthe-drinking. He lay down under the yoke beneath which he had
previously wept, and so succeeded in going still lower. So that night
Valentine had won his intended triumph, although for a while it had been
in jeopardy.
Doctor Levillier was in perplexity; he had been brought to the very
threshold of revelation, and then thrust back into an every-day world
of thwarted hopes and broken ambitions.
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