"My dear Julian, we shall be forced to think the absinthe has been at work too busily in your brain. What is the matter?"
"Nothing."
"One would think we had been having a sitting, you are so excited."
Julian suddenly drew his breath sharply, as if struck by a shot of an idea.
"Let us have one," he cried.
The distant bells rang faintly. The doctor thrilled to the suggestion, still bound by magic, surely. For now, since the inspiring exclamation of Cuckoo, which had broken his theories on the wheel and swept his reason like a dead flower along the wind, he no longer condemned, as a danger only, that which had produced the trance from which, as from a strange prison, had come the new Valentine. The former sitting had, it seemed, beckoned that trance, and with the trance had beckoned an incredibly evil and powerful thing. What if that which had the power to give had also the power to take away? Often it is so in ordinary conditions of life. Why not also in extraordinary conditions? So his thoughts ran, fantastically enough, to the sound of the far-off bells.
"A good notion," he said on the spur of the moment and this quick reflection.
"You think so?" said Valentine. "You who condemned us, even wrung a promise from us against sitting."
His regard was suspicious.
"Perhaps I have changed my mind. Perhaps I take the matter less seriously," said the doctor.