“It flew away!”

“Where did it go?” ejaculated Cuckoo.

Valentine seemed suddenly to become fully aware of the depth of her interest.

“Ah! even you are fascinated by my gospel, you who cannot understand it,” he said.  “But I cannot tell you where it went.  I too have wondered.”

He knit his brows rather moodily over this question of location.  “I too have wondered.  But I imagine that it died; that it ceased to be.  Divorced from the body that was its home, degraded by dissatisfaction with itself, of what use could it be to any one?  Even if it still continues to be, it is practically dead, for it can work neither harm nor good to any one, and the thing that cannot be good or evil, or turn others towards the one or the other, is dead.  It is no more a will.  It is no more an influence.  It is a heart without a pulse in it; in fact, it is nothing.”

A sort of joy had leapt into his face as he dwelt on this idea of nothingness, and he added: 

“It is something like your soul, my lady of the feathers.  Do you hear me?”

“Yes.  I hear!”

“But the will that ousted it gained in power by that triumph.  Totally self-satisfied, desirous of being only that which it is, having no enemy of yearning disappointment with itself in its camp, it can do what will never did before.  It can lead captive the soul that was formerly the captive of the soul that it drove away to die.  Like an enemy it has seized its opponent’s camp, and the slave dwelling in that camp is now its slave forever.”

As Valentine spoke he seemed to become almost intoxicated with the thoughts conjured up by his own words.  His blue eyes blazed with a fury of shining excitement.  His white cheeks were suffused with blood.

“I have made myself, my will, a god!” he exclaimed passionately.

At the words the lady of the feathers moved suddenly forward on the sofa.

“What—­you!” she said.

The last word was uttered with an intensity that could surely only spring from something near akin to comprehension, if not from actual comprehension itself.  It certainly startled Valentine, or seemed to startle him.  His face showed an amazement like the amazement of a man raving to an image of wood, to whom, abruptly, the wood speaks with a tongue.

“What do you mean?” he said, and his voice faltered from its note of triumph and of exultation.

Cuckoo resumed her former position.

“Only was you the will, or the man, or whatever it all is?” she replied in the voice of one hopelessly muddled.

Valentine was reassured as to her stupidity.

“That has nothing to do with the story,” he said.

“There was two of them, was there?” she persisted, but still with the accent of a hopeless dullard.

“Oh yes.  One will must always work upon another, or else there could be no story worth the telling.”