"Ah, Val! on the night of your trance."
"Yes. You were not here then, lady of the feathers."
He spoke with a light mockery.
"I fainted, or died—the doctor was deceived into thinking so—and was born again in the dawn of the very day on which Julian first met you."
Cuckoo shivered with the recollection of Marr and her horror of that night.
"Why do you shiver?" Valentine continued. "Do you find the room cold?"
"No, no."
Indeed, the heat and the overpowering scent of the hyacinths had previously weighed upon her physique, and increased the malaise into which her curious new dutifulness, and the faint spectre which drew near to her, had brought her.
"Perhaps you shiver in the influence of this little room," he continued, persistently. "Julian and I once did so. Eh, Julian?"
"Yes, in those sittings."