How, indeed, could such a creature have power over fellow man or woman for good or for evil?  If weakness can be written without words, it seemed written in that wasted countenance, which Cuckoo examined with a creeping horror that numbed her like frost.  As she did so, Valentine was watching the ungraciousness of her face in the glass deepen and glide, moment by moment, into greater ugliness, greater degradation.  And as the little light there had ever been behind those unquiet eyes, faded gradually away, in his reflected eyes the light leaped up into fuller glare, sparkling to unbridled triumph.  And his reflected lips smiled more defiantly, until the smile was no longer touched merely with triumph, but with something more vehement and more malign!  Cuckoo did not see the change.  She saw only herself, and her heart cried and wailed, What good—­what good to love Julian?  What good to hate Valentine?  What good to fight for the man she loved against the man she loathed?  As well set a doll to move its tense joints against an army, or a scarecrow to defy a god!  Never before had she realized thoroughly the complete tragedy of her life.  Hitherto she had assisted at it in fragments, coming in for a scene here, a scene there.  Now she sat through the whole of the five acts, and the only thing she missed was the fall of the curtain.  That remained up.  But why?  There was—­there could be—­nothing more to come, unless a dreary recapitulation of such dreary events as had already been displayed.  Such a cup could hold no wine that was not foul, thick, and poisonous.  And she had known herself so little as to imagine that she could really love, and that her love might fulfil itself in protection instead of sensual gratification.  Yes, vaguely she had believed that.  She had even believed that she could put on armour and do battle against—­and at this point in her desperate meditation the lady of the feathers shifted her eyes from her own face mirrored to the face beside it.  As she did so, a sudden cry escaped from her lips.  For a moment she thought she saw the face of the dead Marr, and the hallucination was so vivid that when it was gone and the mirror once more revealed the face of Valentine, Cuckoo had no thought but that she had really seen Marr.  She turned sharply round and cast a glance behind her.  Then: 

“Did you see him?” she whispered to Valentine.

“Whom?”

“Him—­Marr!  He’s not dead; he’s here; he’s here, I tell you.  I see him in the glass!”

She shivered.  The room seemed spinning round with her, and the two faces danced and sprang in the mirror, as if a hand shook it up and down, from side to side.

“If he is here,” Valentine said, “it is not in the way you fancy.  Your imagination has played you a trick.”

“Didn’t you—­didn’t you see him?  Don’t you see him now?”

“I see only you and myself.”

As if for a joke he bent his head and peered closely at the mirror, like a man endeavouring to discern some very pale and dim reflection there.