Now and then she rose suddenly on her elbow, half turned her head towards the window and listened.  She had thought she heard a step on the pavement pause, and the cry of the little iron gate.  Then, reassured, she leaned back once more.  She had taken off her boots, and her feet, in black stockings gone a little white at the toes, were tilted up on the shoulder of the sofa.  She fixed her eyes mechanically upon them while she began, all-confusedly, and with the blurred vagueness of the illiterate, to plan out a campaign.  Not that she said that word to herself; she did not know its meaning.  All that she knew was, that she wanted to put her back against the wall, or get into an angle, like a cornered animal, and use her teeth and claws against Valentine, that menacing figure with an angel’s face.  And what disgusted and drove Cuckoo almost mad as she lay there in the crude gaslight was the abominable fact that she was desperately afraid of Valentine.  There was something about him which filled her not only with intense horror, but with something worse than horror,—­intense fear.  Why, she had all three gas-burners alight because, having met him that night and seen him watching her, she trembled at the faintest shadow and must see things plainly, lest their dim outlines should appal her fancy by taking his form.

Only once had the lady of the feathers known such enfeebling terror as this, on the night when she fled from the hotel in the Euston Road and left Marr dying on the bed between the tall windows.  More than once, in her thoughts, had she loosely linked Marr with Valentine, puzzled, scarcely knowing why she did so.  And, she repeated the mental operation now more definitely.  They had at least one thing in common, this extraordinary power of striking fear into her soul.  And Cuckoo was not accustomed to sit with fear.  Her life had bred in her a strong, tough-fibred restlessness.  She was essentially a careless creature, ready to argue, quarrel, hold her own with anybody, proud, as a rule, of being a match for any man and well able to take care of herself.  She had knocked about, and was utterly familiar with many horrors of the streets, and of nameless houses.  She had heard many rows at night; had been in brawls; had been waked, in the dense hours, by sudden sharp cries for help; was accustomed to be alone with strangers, men of unknown history, of unknown deeds.  And all these circumstances she met with absolute carelessness, with a devil-may-care laugh, or the sigh of one weary, but not afraid.  She was no more timid than the average English street-boy.  Only these two men, one dead, one alive, knew how to dress her in terror from head to foot, brain, heart, and body.  And so she joined them in a ghastly brotherhood.

But to-night she was making a conscious effort against the domination of Valentine, for the awakening of fear in her was counterbalanced by other feelings prompting her to fight.  And once Cuckoo began to fight she felt that she would not lack courage.  For she clung to action, and hated thought, walking clearly in the one, but through a maze in the other.