It was this knowledge of her unwilling action against Julian’s peace that first woke in her the strong protective feeling towards him, a feeling almost akin to the maternal instinct.  It was her strange love for him that prompted the fiery antagonism against his relations with others that could only be called jealousy.  And though one of her passions was noble, the other pitiable, they could but work together for the same end, aim at a similar salvation.

Yet how could any salvation for a man come out of that dreary house in the Marylebone Road, from that piteous rouged agent of the devil?

Cuckoo never stopped to ask such a question as that.  She was a girl, and she began to understand love.  She had no time to stop.  And each passing day soon began to give fresh vitality to the vision of Julian’s need.

Between him and her there had sprung up on the ruins of one night’s folly a tower of comradeship.  Its foundations were not of sand.  Even Cuckoo, despite her ceaseless jealously, felt that.  But, after all, she had only come into his life as a desolate waif drifts into a settled community.  She was neither of his class, his understanding, or his education.  She was in the gutter; in the gutter to an extent that no man, as women feel at present, can ever be.  And though through her inspiration he had not to come into the gutter to find her and to be with her, yet she sometimes writhed with the thought that he was so far above her.  Nevertheless, her position never once tempted her, in the struggle that the future quickly brought with it, to shrink from effort, to fail in fight, to despair in endeavour for him.

There are flames that burn the dross from humanity and reveal the gold.  There are flames in the eyes and in the hearts of women.

* * * * *

Julian’s visits to Cuckoo were irregular but fairly frequent.  He always came in the afternoon, an hour or two before the psychological moment of her start out for the evening’s duty.  Sometimes he would take her out to tea at a small Italian restaurant near Baker Street Station.  More often they would make tea together in the little sitting-room, with the ecstatic assistance of Jessie.  And Rip, Valentine’s dog, generally made one of the party.  He and Jessie got on excellently together, and devoutly shared the scraps that fell from the Marylebone Road table.  The first time that Julian brought Rip to number 400, Cuckoo fell in love with him.

“Why, you never said you had a dog,” she exclaimed.

“Rip’s not mine,” Julian answered.

“Isn’t he?  Whose is he?”

“Valentine’s.”

“Then why d’you have him with you?” asked Cuckoo, suddenly and rather roughly pushing away Rip, who was swirling in her lap like a whirlpool.

“Oh, he’s taken a stupid dislike to Valentine,” Julian answered thoughtlessly.  “He won’t stay with him.”

In a moment Cuckoo had caught the little dog back.