he knew Cuckoo was sobbing at his back, and though his heart held a sense of pity for her trouble, yet he heard her grief with a strange cruelty, at which he wondered, without being able to soften it.  That afternoon it seemed to him useless for anybody to cry.  No grief was quite worth tears.  The violence of life was present with him, gave him light and blinded him at the same time.  He found delight in the thought of violence, because it held action in its grasp.  Even cruelty was worth something.  Was he cruel to Cuckoo?

He turned from the window and looked at her, with the observation of a nature not generally his own.  He noted the desolation of her hair, and he noted, too, that she wore the gown he had given to her.  Would she have put it on if she had hated him as she said she did?  Somehow it scarcely seemed to suit her to-day.  It looked draggled, and as if it had been up all night, he thought.  The black back of it heaved as Cuckoo sobbed, like a little black wave.  Was the eternal movement of the sea caused by some horrible, inward grief which, though secret, must come thus to the eye of God and of the world?  Julian found himself wondering in an unreasonable abstraction as he contemplated the crying girl.  Then suddenly his mind swerved to more normal paths; he was seized by the natural feeling of a man who has made a woman weep, and had the impulse to comfort.

“Don’t cry, Cuckoo,” he said, coming over to her and sitting on the edge of her chair.  “You must not.  Let us say I was mad last night.  Perhaps I was.  Men are often mad, surely.  To-day I’m sane, and I want you to forgive me.”

He put his arm round her shoulder.  She glanced up at him.  Then, with the odd penetration that so often gilds female ignorance till it dazzles and distracts, she said quickly: 

“You don’t mean what you say; you don’t really care.”

Julian was taken aback by her sharpness, and by the self-revelation that immediately stabbed him.

“You mustn’t say that,” he began.  But she stopped him on the instant.

“You don’t care; you think it’s nothing.  So it ought to be to me, I know.”

That had perhaps actually been his thought, the thought of a mind unimaginative to-day, because deadened by the excitement of action.  But if it was his thought he hastened to deny it.

“You know I don’t think of you in that way,” he said.

“You will now.  You do.”

That was the scourge that had lashed her all through this weary day of miserable reaction; that now stung her to a passion that was like the passion of purity.  As she made this statement there was a question in her eyes, but it was a question of despair, that scarcely even asked for the negative which Julian hastened to give.  He was both perplexed and troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself as the cause.  But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was irrevocable had none of the