the heart of lust.  And that pavement is the camping-ground of the army of the bats.  On wet nights they flit drearily through the rain.  In winter they glide like shadows among the revealing snows.  But in the time of flowers and of soft airs, when the moon at the full swims calmly above the towers of Westminster, and the Thames rests rocked in a silver dream among the ebony wharves and barges, the flight of the bats is gay and their number is legion.  And their circle is joined by many who are but recruits, or as camp-followers, treading in the track of those whose names are on the roll-call.

The lady of the feathers rarely failed to join the evening flight of the bats.  Her acquaintance with Julian, even her curious passion for his respect and distant treatment, had not won her to different evenings, or to a new mode of life.  But her feeling for Julian led her to ignore now the fact of this fate of hers.  She chose to set him aside from it, to keep him for a friend, as an innocent peasant-girl might keep some recluse wandering after peace into her solitude.  Julian was to be the one man who looked on her with quiet, habitual eyes, who touched her with calm, gentle hand, who spoke to her with the voice of friendship, demanding nothing, and thought of her with a feeling that was neither greed nor contempt.  And that one fatal night in which Cuckoo’s private and secluded heart was so bitterly wounded she put out of her recollection with a strength of determination soldier-like and almost fierce.  It lay in the past, but she did not treat the past as a woman treats a drawer full of old, used things, opening it in quiet moments and turning over its contents with a lingering and a loving hand.  She shut it, locked it almost angrily, and never, never looked into it.  Julian was to be her friend of leisure, never associated in any way with her tragic hours.  All other men were the same, stamped with a similar hall-mark.  He only was unstamped and was beautiful.

On this evening of summer, Cuckoo, as usual, joined the flight of the bats with a tired wing.  The heat tried her.  Her cheeks were white as ivory under their cloud of rouge.  Her mouth was more plaintive even than usual, and her heart felt dull and heavy.  As she got out of the omnibus at the Circus one of her ankles turned, and she gave an awkward jump that set all the feathers on her hat in commotion, and made the newspaper boys laugh at her scornfully.  They knew her by sight, and joked her every evening when she arrived.  At first—­that was a long while ago—­she had resented their remarks, still more their shrewd unboyish questions, and had answered them with angry bitterness.  But—­well, that was a long while ago.  Now she simply recovered her footing, paused a moment on the kerbstone to arrange her dress, and then drifted away into the crowd slowly, without even glancing at her nightly critics, who were aware of a new bow on her gown, recognized with imperturbable sang-froid the change in a trimming or the alteration of a waist-belt.