Julian had resolved to keep his compact with the lady of the feathers.  He had learned partially to understand the curious and beautiful attitude which her mind had assumed towards him, polluted as it must be by the terror and working out of her fate, by many dreary actions, and by many vile imaginings.  But although he held to his promise he did not, after that night of crisis, resume his former career of asceticism tempered by winds of temptation which could never blow his casement open.  There are men who can vary the fine monotony of virtue by an occasional deliberate error, and who return from such an excursion into dangerous by-paths drilled and comforted, as it appears, for further journeying along the main road of their respectability.  But Julian was not such a man.  He resembled rather the morphia victim, or the inebriate, who must at all hazards abstain from any indulgence, even the smallest, in drug or draught, lest the demon who has such charm for him clasp him in imperturbable arms, and refuse with the steadfastness of a once-tricked Venus ever to let him go again.

Valentine’s empire of five years was broken in one night.

At first Julian was scarcely conscious that his descent was not momentary, but rather tending to the permanent.  Certainly, at the first, he was inclined to have the schoolboy outlook upon it, and the schoolboy outlook is as a glance through the wrong end of a telescope, dwindling giant sins to the stature of pigmies, and pigmy sins to mere points of darkness which equal nothingness.  But, strangely enough, it was his interview with the weeping Cuckoo, that Magdalen of the streets, which drove the schoolboy to limbo, and set virtue and vice for the moment rightly on the throne and in the gutter.  Despite his comparatively dull mood and tendency to a calm of self-satisfaction in the Marylebone Road, Julian could not be wholly unmoved by the passion of Cuckoo’s regret, nor entirely unaware that it was a passion in which he must have some share, whether now or at some more distant time, when the thrall of recently moved senses was weakened, and the numbness really born of excitement melted in the quiet expansion of a manly and a reasonable calm.  His understanding of her passion, none too definite at first, gave him a moment’s wonder, both at her and at himself.  It seemed strange that the shattered influence of Valentine should be of less account to him who had known and loved it than to her who had never known it.  It seemed stranger still that the streets—­those wolves which tear one by one the rags of good from human nature, till it stands naked and tearless beneath the lamps, which are the eyes of the wolves—­stranger that those streets should have left to one of their children a veil so bridal and so beautiful as that which hung round Cuckoo when she wept.  Julian was almost driven to believe that sin and purity can dwell together in one woman, yet never have intercourse.  Yet he knew that to be impossible.  The fact remained