“Never mind,” Cuckoo replied.  “It don’t matter.”

But he was not to be denied.

“D’you mean Valentine?” he asked.

She nodded her head slowly.  Although Julian had half suspected that Valentine might be there this confirmation of his suspicion gave him a decided shock.

“Oh, he was just walking home from some party,” he exclaimed.

“P’raps.”

“I’m certain of it.”

“He don’t matter,” she said with a hard accent.

She drank the chartreuse very slowly, and seemed to be reflecting, and a change came over her face.  It softened as much as a painted face can soften under dyed hair.

“Dearie,” she said, “it makes me sick to see you like the rest.”

“I never pretended to be anything different.”

“But you was different,” she asserted.  “I know you was different.”

How could she have divined the change in Julian that one night of the Empire had wrought?

“I say,” she went on, and her voice was trembling with eagerness, “you’ve got to tell me somethin’.”

“Well?”

“That night I—­I—­it wasn’t me made you different, was it?”

And as she spoke Julian knew that it was she.  Perhaps a fleeting expression in his face—­telling naked truth as expressions may, though words belie them—­made her understand, for her cheeks turned grey beneath the paint on them.

“I wish I’d killed myself long ago,” she said in a whisper.

“Hush!” he exclaimed, cursing his tell-tale features.  “I’m not different; and if I was you could have nothing to do with it.”

She said no more, but he saw by her brooding expression that she clung to her intuition, and knew what he denied.

The hands of the clock fixed on the wall above their heads pointed to the half-hour after midnight.  The pale and weary waiters were racing to and fro clearing the tables, dodging this way and that with trays, stealing along with arms full of long-stemmed, thick tumblers, eager for rest.  The electric moons gave a sudden portentous wink.

“Time!” a voice cried.

People began to get up and move out, exchanging loud good-nights.  The long room slowly assumed an aspect of desertion and greedy desolation.

“We must go,” Julian said.

Cuckoo woke out of that reverie, which seemed so chilly, so terrible even.  She glanced at Julian, and her eyes were again full of tears.  He was standing, and he bent down to her with his two hands resting upon the marble of the table.  He bent down and then suddenly stooped lower, lower, almost glaring into her eyes.  She went back in her seat a little, half frightened.

“What’s it?” she murmured.

But Julian only remained fixedly looking into her eyes.  In the pool of the tears of them he saw two tiny shadowy flames, flickering, as he thought, but quite clear, distinct, unmistakable.  And there came a thick beating in his side.  His heart beat hard.  Each time he had seen the vision of the flame he had been instantly impressed with a sense of strange mystery, as if at the vision of some holy thing, a flame upon a prayer-blessed altar, a flame ascending from a tear-washed sacrifice.  And now he saw this thing that he fancied holy burning behind the tears in Cuckoo’s eyes!