Julian hailed a hansom and put her into it.  She gazed at him as if she was almost afraid to part from him.

“You’ll—­you’ll come and see me again,” she said, wistfully.

“Yes, I’ll come,” he answered.

“For God’s sake, don’t bring him, dearie,” she said, with an upward lift of her feathered head towards the block of mansions.

Then she drove off into the darkness.

CHAPTER IX

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS WASHES HER FACE

It was at this point in his career that Julian, just for a time, began keenly to observe Valentine, and to wonder if there were hidden depths in his friend which he had never sounded.  The cause of the dawning of this consideration lay in Cuckoo’s strange assertion and fear of Valentine, primarily, but there were other reasons prompting him to an unusual attitude of attention, although he might not at first have been able to name them.  He could not believe that there was any change in Valentine, but he fancied that there might be some side of Valentine’s nature which he did not fully understand, which others vaguely felt and wrongly interpreted.  For it was the instinctive creatures in whom Valentine’s presence now seemed to awake distrust, and surely an instinct may be too violent, or move in a wrong direction, and yet be inspired by some subtlety in the character that awakens it, and prompts it, and drives it forward.  Julian thought that he found a reason for Cuckoo’s aversion in Valentine’s lofty refinement, which would naturally jar upon her nature of the streets.  For her pathos, her better impulses, which had touched him and led him to sympathy with her, were perhaps only stars in a mind that must be a dust-heap of horrible memories and coarse thoughts.  To protect Valentine from even the most diminutive shadow of suspicion, Julian was ready silently to insist that Cuckoo was radically bad, although he really knew that she was rather a weak sacrifice than an eager sinner.

Her declaration that Valentine was evil carried complete conviction of its sincerity.  Indeed, her obvious fear of him proved this.  And this fear of a woman reminded Julian of the fear exhibited towards Valentine by Rip, a terror which still continued, to such an extent, indeed, that the little dog was now never permitted to be in the presence of its master.

“You are rather an awe-inspiring person, Valentine,” Julian said one day.

Valentine looked surprised.

“I never knew it,” he answered.  “Who is afraid of me?”

“Oh, I don’t know—­well, Rip, for one, and—­and that girl, Cuckoo, for another.”

“Why is she afraid?”

“I can’t imagine.”

“I could soon put her at her ease, and I will do so.”

He went over to the mantelpiece and took up an envelope that was lying there.  From it he drew a slip of coloured paper.

“This will be the talisman,” he said.  “Have you forgotten that Saturday is boat-race day?”