“I’m just the same as I was,” Julian said, and he spoke with quite sincere conviction.

“No, you ain’t.”

Having uttered this very direct contradiction, Cuckoo proceeded with great energy: 

“You’ve been lettin’ him do it.  I know you have.”

Julian was completely puzzled.

“What do you mean?” he asked, with a real desire for information.

“You know well enough.  He’s leadin’ you wrong.”

Julian reddened with a sudden understanding.  Her words touched him in his sorest place.  In the first place, no man likes to think he has been doing a thing because he has been led by some one else.  In the second, Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo’s unreasoning antipathy to Valentine.  Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would get over it.  Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once told her that he could not hear Valentine abused.  Since that day she had been careful not to mention his name.  But now her bitterness against him peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during the interval.

“Cuckoo, you’re talking great nonsense,” he said, forcing himself to speak quietly.

But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned from the subject or silenced.

“No, I ain’t,” she said.  “Where was you last week?  You didn’t come in once.”

“I was in Paris.”

Cuckoo’s brow clouded still more.  Her knowledge of Paris was not intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of geographical or artistic.  Julian’s mention of the French capital drove a sword into her.

“With him?” she exclaimed.

“Yes, with Valentine.”

“Oh, what did you do there?”

She spoke with angry insistence, and Julian could not help thinking of Valentine’s remark, “That girl loves you.”  It seemed indeed that Cuckoo must have some deep and wholly personal reason prompting her to this strange demonstration of vexation.

“I can’t tell you everything,” Julian answered.

“Oh, you can’t kid me over that.  I know well enough what men go to Paris for!” she rejoined, with almost hysterical bitterness.

Julian was silent.  It was curious, but this girl stirred his conscience from its sleep, as once Valentine alone could stir it.  But by how different a method!  The stillness and calm of one who was sinless were replaced by the vehemence and the passion of one who was steeped in sin.  And yet the two opposites had, to some extent, the same effect.  Julian did not yet realize this thoroughly, and did not analyze it at all.  Had any one hinted to him that the waning influence of Valentine for good could ever be balanced by the waxing influence of the lady of the feathers, he would have laughed at the crazy notion.  And in the first place he would have denied that Valentine’s