At last she began to fear that Julian would never come back, and by a sudden impulse she wrote to him a short, very ill-spelt letter, hoping he would come to tea with her on a certain afternoon.  On the day mentioned she waited in an agony of expectation.  She had put on his black dress, removed all traces of paint and powder from her face, remembering his former request and her experiment, tricked Jessie out in a bright yellow satin riband twisted into a bow almost larger than herself, and bought flowers—­large ones, sunflowers—­to give to her dingy room an air of refinement and of gaiety.  Amid all this brilliancy of yellow satin and yellow flowers she waited uneasily in her simple black gown.  The day was dull, not wet, but brooding and severe, iron-grey, like a hard-featured Puritan, and still with the angry peace of coming thunder.  The window was open to let in air, but no air seemed to enter, only the weariful and incessant street noises.  Jessie wriggled about, biting sideways with animation to get at her yellow adornment, and pattering around the furniture seeking stray crumbs, which sometimes eluded her for a while and, lying in hidden nooks and corners, unexpectedly rewarded her desultory and impromptu search.  Cuckoo leaned her arms across the table, glanced at the tea things for two, and listened.  A cab stopped presently.  She twisted in her chair to face the window.  It had drawn up next door, and she subsided again into her fever of attention.  Jessie found a crumb and swallowed it with as much action and large air of tasting it as if it had been a city dinner.  The hands of the clock drew to the hour named in Cuckoo’s note, touched it, passed it.  A sickness of despair began to creep upon her like a thousand little biting insects.  She shuffled in her seat, glanced this way and that, pressed her lips together, and, taking her arms from the table, clasped her hands tightly in her lap.  Then she sat straight up and counted the tickings of the clock, the spots on the tablecloth, the gold stars upon the wallpaper of the room.  She counted and counted until her head began to swim.  And all the time she waited, the lady of the feathers was learning wisdom.  The lesson was harsh, as the lessons of time usually are; the lesson was bitter as Marah waters.  And she thought the lesson was going to be a cross too heavy for her narrow shoulders to bear when the iron gate of the garden sang its invariable little note of protest on being opened.  Cuckoo’s head turned slowly to one side.  Her haggard eyes swept the view of the path.  Julian was walking up it.

She met him very quietly, almost seriously, and he shook hands with her as if they had been together quite recently and parted the best of friends.  Only, as he held her hand, she noticed that he cast a hasty, and as she fancied a fearful, glance into her eyes.  Then he seemed reassured and they sat down to tea.  Cuckoo supposed that he had for the moment dreaded what she called another row, and was