"Didn't you hear it?"
"No."
Julian turned to the doctor.
"It was an unearthly sound," he said. "Like nothing I have ever heard or imagined. And, doctor, just afterward I saw something, something that made me believe Valentine was really dead."
"What was it?"
Julian hesitated. Then he avoided directly replying to the question.
"Doctor," he said, "of course I needn't ask you if you have often been at deathbeds?"
"I have. Very often," Levillier replied.
"I have never seen any one die," Julian continued, still with excitement. "But people have told me, people who have watched by the dying, that at the moment of death sometimes a tiny flame, a sort of shadow almost, comes from the lips of the corpse and evaporates into the air. And they say that flame is the soul going out of the body."
"I have never seen that," Levillier said. "And I have watched many deaths."