"And Mr. Addison?"
"I couldn't quite say, sir, as to that."
"Do you mean that he looks ill?"
"I couldn't say, sir. Mr. Julian don't look quite what he was, to my view, sir."
"Oh."
The butler's level voice mingled with the clouded red of the room, and again a prophetic chord of change was struck.
"Thank you, Wade" said the doctor.
The man retired, and the doctor was left alone in the empty room.
* * * * *
Although he was intensely sensitive, Doctor Levillier was not a man whose nerves played him tricks. He was, above all things, sane, both in mind and in body, full of a lively calm, and a bright power of observation. Indeed, having made the nervous system his special life study, he was, perhaps, less liable than most other human beings to be carried away by the fancies that many people tabulate as realities, or to be governed by the beings that have no real existence and are merely projected by the action of the imagination. Half, at least, of his great success in life had been owing to his self-possession, which never verged on hardness or fused itself with its near relation, stolidity. No man, in fact, was less likely to be upset by the creatures of his mind than he. Yet when Wade had gently closed the drawing-room door and retreated into his private region, the doctor allowed himself to become the possession of an influence which, to the end of his life, he believed to proceed from the empty room in which he sat, not from his mind who sat there. The electric light shone softly beneath the shades that shrouded it, and revealed delicately but clearly every smallest detail of the crowded chamber.