an angel, for the moment. Long after that evening was dead, both Julian
and Doctor Levillier anxiously, and in their different ways analytically,
considered it. They submitted it to a secret process of probing, such as
many men enforce upon what they imagine to be great causes in their
lives. That hour became an hour of wonder, an hour of amazement, viewed
in the illumination of subsequent events. They found in it a curious
climax of misunderstanding, a culmination of all deceptive things.

And yet, in that hour they only watched a young man of London, a modern
intellectual youth, playing in a Victoria Street drawing-room upon a
Steinway grand piano.

They were sitting sideways to Valentine, and a little behind him.
Therefore he could not easily see them unless he slightly turned his
head. But they could observe him, and, obeying Doctor Levillier's mute
injunction, Julian now did so.

Valentine was gazing straight before him over the top, of the piano, and
his eyes seemed to be fixed upon the dim figure of Christ in the picture
of "The Merciful Knight." Was he not playing to the picture, playing to
that figure in it? And did not his musical imagination seek to reproduce
in sound the vision of the life of that mailed knight who never lived and
died? The purity of his expression, always consummate, was to-night more
peculiar, more unearthly, than before in any place, at any moment. And,
as mere line can convey to the senses of man a conception of a great
virtue or of a great vice, the actual shape of his features, thus seen in
profile, was the embodiment of an exquisitely ascetic purity, as much an
embodiment as is a drop of water pierced by a sunbeam. This struck both
Doctor Levillier and Julian, and the doctor was amazed anew at the silent
decree that the invisible shall be made visible in forms comprehensible