“And you saw him here to-night before I met you?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“How long ago?”

“Two hours, I dare say.”

After that Julian ceased to think of the vision of the moon.  But presently he noticed that Cuckoo was walking more slowly.

“You’re tired?” he said.

She nodded.

“Have you been out all the evening?”

She nodded again.

“Take a cab and go home.  I’ll pay the man.”

“No; I can’t go yet.”

“Why not?”

“I can’t,” she repeated, and a mulish look of obstinacy came into her face.

Julian guessed the miserable reason.

“Let me—­” he began, and in a moment his hand would have been in his pocket.  She stopped him.

“I told you as I never would, not from you,” she said.  “And I wouldn’t, all the more since—­since that night.”

Then, after an instant, she added: 

“But you’d better leave me to myself now.”

And then Julian realized that his presence and company were ruining her chance.  That thought turned him sick and dull.

“I can’t,” he began almost desperately.

She gave with her hand a little twitch at his.

“I say,” she whispered, and she spoke to him as if to Jessie in the tiny flannel-lined basket, “Go bials! will you?”

“But you?” he said, and there was something that was half a sob in his voice.

“I can’t.  But you—­go bials.”

And then, to please her, he held up his hand and hailed a hansom.  Getting in he gave the direction of his rooms, loud enough for her to hear.  She stood at the edge of the pavement and nodded at him as she heard it.

Then she turned away, and Julian saw the feathers in her big hat waving, as she joined once more the flight of the bats.

CHAPTER IV

THE FLAME IN A WOMAN’S EYES

“That girl loves you,” Valentine had said, when Julian told him of Cuckoo’s strange fragmentary sermon in the Monico, and of its effect upon himself.

Valentine spoke without any emotion or sympathy, and the absence of feeling from his voice seemed almost to bring a certain slight vexation into his manner.  The love of Cuckoo, perhaps naturally, was to his fine nature a thing of no account, or even of ill account.  At least, his look and manner faintly said so to Julian.

“But if she loves me,” Julian said, and a certain wonder came into his heart at the thought, “surely she wouldn’t behave to me as she does, turning me from a lover into a friend, and keeping me almost angrily in the latter relation.”

“Perhaps not,” Valentine said languidly.