The sun came out with a sudden violence, and an organ began to play a frisky tune in the street.  Jessie whined and whimpered, formed her mouth into the shape of an O, and, throwing up her head, emitted a vague and smothered howl.  Below stairs, Mrs. Brigg, who was afflicted with a complaint that prompted her to perpetual anxious movement, laboured about the kitchen, doing nothing in particular, among her pots and pans.  The occasional clatter of them mingled with the sound of the organ, and with the suffocated note of Jessie, in a depressing symphony.  The sun went in again, and some dust, stirred into motion by a passing omnibus, floated in through the half-open window and settled in a light film upon the photograph of Marr.  Presently the organ moved away, and faded gradually in pert tunes down the street.  Jessie’s nervous system, no longer played upon, ceased to spend its pain in sound, and a London silence fell round the little room.  Then, at length, Cuckoo shifted in her chair, stretched her hands in her lap, and sat up slowly.  The inward expression had not faded from her eyes yet, for, leaning forward, she still stared blankly before her, looking, as it seemed, straight at Marr’s photograph.  Gradually she woke to a consciousness of what she was looking at, and putting up one hand she took the photograph from its place, laid it in her lap, and, bending down, gazed at it long and earnestly.  Then she shook her head as if puzzled.

“I don’t know,” she murmured; “I don’t know.”

Encouraged by the sound of her mistress’s voice, Jessie stepped from her basket and gingerly approached, snuffling round Cuckoo’s feet, and wriggling her body in token of anxious humility.  Cuckoo picked her up and stroked her mechanically, but still with her eyes on the photograph.  Two tears swam in them.  She dashed the photograph down.  It lay on the carpet, and was still there when a knock at the door was succeeded by the entrance of Julian.

He, too, looked pale and rather weary, but excited.

“Cuckoo,” he said.

She sat still in the chair, looking at him.

“Well?” she said, and closed her lips tightly.

He came a step or two forward into the little room, and put his hat and stick down on the table.

“You expected me to come, didn’t you?”

“I don’t know as I did.”

Her eyes were on Jessie now, and she stroked the little dog’s back steadily up and down, alternately smoothing and ruffling its short coat.  Julian came over and stood by the mantelpiece.

“I told you I should come.”

“Did you?”

“Don’t you remember?”

She shifted round in the chair till he could only see her shoulder, and the side of her head and neck, on which the loose hair was tumbling in ugly confusion.  Sitting thus she threw back at him the sentence: 

“I don’t want to remember nothing.  I don’t want to remember.”

Julian stood hesitating.  He glanced at Cuckoo’s hair and at the back of her thin hand moving to and fro above the little contented dog.