“I was emancipated, and I was mad.  Mind, I didn’t mean to do you any wrong, but if you have thought of me in a different way, I’m sorry.  Tell me what you want me to be to you, and in future I’ll be it.”

Hope and eagerness sprang up in her eyes then.

“I say,” she began,

“Yes.”

“You promise?”

“I promise.”

The dull blood rose in her tired face.

“I want just a—­just a friend,” she said, as if almost ashamed.

Julian smiled.

“Not a lover,” he said, with a fleeting air of gallantry.  She shrank visibly from the word, and hurriedly went on: 

“Not I. I’ve had too much of love.”  The last word was spoken with a violence of contempt.  “I want a man as likes me, just really likes me, as he might another man.  See?”

“And you’ll not love him?”

His eyes searched hers with a gaiety of inquiry that was almost laughter.  Cuckoo looked away.

“I’ll not love him either,” she said steadily.  “I’ll just like him too.”

Seeing her earnestness and obvious emotion, Julian dropped his gently quizzing manner, and became earnest, too, in his degree.

“Then it’s a bargain,” he said.  “You and I are to like each other thoroughly, never anything more, never anything less.  Like two men, eh?”

She began at last to look relieved and happier.

“Yes, like that,” she said.  “Ain’t it—­ain’t it truer than the other thing?  There’s something beastly about love; that’s what I always think.”

And she spoke with the sincerest conviction.  When Julian left her that day, he shook hands with her by the door; she stood after he had done it as if still half expectant.

“There’s a man’s good-bye to a man,” he said.  “Better sort of thing than a man’s good-bye to a woman, isn’t it?”

“Rather!” she said hastily, and moved back into the sitting-room.  She stepped on something, and bent down to pick it up.  It was Marr’s photograph.

“What’s that?” Julian asked.

“Nothing,” she said, concealing it.  She had a foolish fancy that even the photograph of the creature she had feared and hated might spoil that good-bye of theirs.  Yet even as it was, when Julian had gone she still seemed unsatisfied.

She was a woman after all, and woman is most feminine in her farewells.

CHAPTER II

VALENTINE SINGS

When Valentine heard of the scene in Marylebone Road he smiled.

“How extraordinary women are,” he said.  “A man might give his life to them, I suppose, yet never understand them.”

“It would be rather jolly—­making that gift, I mean,” said Julian.

“You think so?  Since last night.”

“I want to talk to you about that, Valentine, d’you blame me?”

“Not a bit.”

“Only wonder at me?”