One night, when she was thus sunk and swallowed up in the maw of miserable inward contemplation, a young man, who was walking by, observed her.  He was very young and eager, fresh from Cambridge, ardent after the mysteries and the subtleties of life, as is the fashion of clever modern youth.  The sight of this painted girl leaning, motionless as some doll or puppet, against the iron shutters of the vacant house, her head drooped, and her hands, as if the strings to manipulate her had fallen loose from the grasp that guided them, caught and eventually fascinated him.  It was a late hour of night.  He passed on and returned, shooting each time a devouring, analytical glance upon Cuckoo.  Again he came back, walking a little nearer to the houses.  His heart beat quicker as he approached the puppet.  Its complete immobility was almost appalling, and each time he came within view of it he examined it violently to see if a limb was displaced.  No; one might almost suppose that it was the body of some one struck dead so suddenly against the shop that she had not had time to fall, and so remained leaning thus.  With shorter and shorter revolutions, like a dog working itself up to approach some motionless but strange object, the youth went by Cuckoo, hesitating more and more each time he came in front of her with strange feelings of one being vaguely criminal.  He longed to touch the puppet, to see if any quiver would convulse its limbs, any light flicker into its eyes.  And he was so fascinated and interested that at last he did furtively stop precisely in front of it.  For a second both of them were motionless, he from contemplation of the outward, she of the inward.  Then Cuckoo’s thoughtful jealousy came to a ghastly crisis.  Her imagination had shown her frightful things and herself an utterly helpless and compelled spectator.  The puppet opened its red lips to utter a sob, lifted up its white and heavy eyelids to let loose tears upon its unnaturally bright cheeks, stirred its hanging hands to clasp them in a crude gesture of dull fury.  The youth started as at a corpse showing suddenly the pangs of life.  His movement shot Cuckoo like a bullet into her real world.  Through her tears she saw a man regarding her.  In a flash, old habit brought to her a smile, a turned head of coquetry, an entreating hand, a hackneyed phrase that reiteration rendered parrot-like in intonation.  The youth shrank back and fled away in the darkness.  Long afterwards that incident haunted him as an epitome of all the horrors of cruel London.

And Cuckoo, thus roused and deserted, put aside for the moment her nightmare, and started once more upon her promenade of the night.