The day had been damp and dreary, and he had suffered from neuralgia.

Doubtless the pain had acted upon his nervous system, and was accountable for his present and perpetually increasing anxiety.

A little later he was fain to dismiss this supposition as untenable.

His sense of constraint was changing into a positive dread, and not at all of Julian, around whom he had believed that his thoughts were in flight.

Something, he knew not at all what, interposed between him and Julian, and so definitely that Valentine felt as if he could have fixed the exact moment in which the interposition had taken place, as one can fix the exact moment in which a person enters a room where one is sitting.