poignancy of Cuckoo’s.  For a long time he had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine.  Now he had left the cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past.  He did not, for the moment, look back at all.  Action had lifted scales from his eyes, had stirred the youth in him, had stung him as if with bright fire, and given him, at a breath, a thousand thoughts, visions, curiosities.  A sense of power came to him.  He did not ask whether the power made for evil or for good.  Simply, he was inclined to glory in it, as a man glories in his recovered strength when he wakes from a long sleep following fatigue.  Cuckoo, with feeble hands, seemed tugging to hold back this power, with feeble voice seemed crying against it as a deadly thing.  And Julian, though he strove to console her, scarcely sympathized with her fully.  He could not, if he would, be quite unhappy to-day.  Only in Cuckoo’s grief he began to read a curious legend.  In her tears there was a passion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the depths of a nature.  Julian began to suspect that through all her sins and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened.  And beyond this door was surely that holy of holies, an unspoiled woman’s heart.  From what other dwelling could rush forth such a passion for a man’s respect, such a fury to be rightly and chivalrously considered?  As he half vaguely realized something of the true position of Cuckoo and of himself, Julian felt stirred by the wonder of life, in which such strange blossoms flower out of the very dust.  He looked at Cuckoo with new eyes.  She looked back at him with the old ones of a girl who loves.

As he looked she stopped crying.  Perhaps the sudden understanding in his gaze thrilled her.  He put out his hand to touch hers, and again repeated his negative, but this time with greater conviction.

“I do not think of you in that way.  I never shall,” he said.

Her face was still full of doubt, and thin with anxiety.  She was not reassured, that seemed apparent; for in her ignorance she had a strange knowledge of life, and especially a strange intuition which guided her instincts as to the instinctive proceedings of men.

“They always do,” she murmured.  “Why should you be different?”

“All men aren’t alike,” he said, pretending to laugh at her.

“Yes, in some things, though,” she contradicted.  “They all think dirt of you for doing what they want.”

Seeing how unsatisfied she was, and how restlessly her anxiety paced up and down, Julian resolved on more plain-speaking.

“Look here, Cuckoo,” he said, and his voice had never sounded more boyish, “last night I was drunk.  Last night I woke up, and I’d been asleep for years.”

“Eh?” she interrupted, looking puzzled, but he went on: