satisfied by her expression of good temper.  They drank their tea, and after a short interval of constraint began chattering together very much as usual.  At first Cuckoo had hardly dared to look much at Julian, lest he should see the joy she felt at his coming, but when she was pouring out his second cup she let her eyes rest fully on his face, and only then did she realize that a shadow lay upon it, a shadow from which it had been free before.

With a trembling hand she filled the cup and stared upon the shadow.  She knew its brethren so well.  In dead days she herself had helped to manufacture such shadows upon the faces of men.  She had seen them come, thin, faint, delicate, impalpable as a veil of mist before morning.  Only morning light never followed them.  And she had seen them stay and grow and deepen and darken.  Shadow over the eyes of the man, shadow round his lips, shadow like a cloud upon the forehead, shadow over the picture painted by the soul, working through the features, that we call expression.  Many times had she seen the journey taken by a man’s face to that haunted bourne, arrived at which it is scarcely any more a man’s face, but only a mask expressive of one, or of many, sins.  Had Julian then definitely set foot upon that journey?  As yet the shadow that lay over him was no more than the lightest film, suggestive of a slightly unnatural and forbidding fatigue.  Yet Cuckoo shrank from it as from a ghost.

“Why, Cuckoo, your hand is trembling!” Julian said.

“Oh, I was out late last night,” she answered, putting the teapot hastily down.  And they talked on, pretending there were only two of them and no shadowy third.

Julian, having returned at last to the Marylebone Road, fell into his old habit of coming there often.  And each time that he came the lady of the feathers counted a fresh step on his hideous journey towards the haunted bourne.  Yet she never spoke of the dreary addition sum she was doing.  She never reproached Julian, or wept, or let him see that her heart was growing cold as a pilgrim who kneels, bare, in long prayers upon the steps of a shrine.  For she had learnt wisdom, and hugged it in her arms.  Valentine was scarcely ever mentioned between them; but once, and evidently by accident, Julian allowed an expression to escape him which implied that Valentine now objected to the intimacy with Cuckoo.  Immediately the words were uttered, Julian looked confused, and obviously would have wished to recall them, had it been possible.

“Oh, I know as he don’t like me,” Cuckoo said.

Julian answered nothing.

“Why d’you come, then?” she continued, with a certain desperation.  “There ain’t nothin’ here to bring you.  I know that well enough.”

She cast a comprehensive glance round over the badly furnished room.

“Nothin’ at all,” she added with a sigh.

While she spoke Julian began to wonder, too, why he came, why he liked to come there.  As Cuckoo said, there was nothing at all to bring him so often.  He liked her, he was sorry for her, he had even a deep-running sympathy for her, but he did not love her.  Yet he was fascinated to come to her, and there were sometimes moments when he seemed taken possession of, led by the hand, to that squalid room and that squalid presence in it.  Why was that?  What led him?  He could not tell.