“Is my life so strict, then?” he asked gently.

“I think little Cuckoo would call it so, eh, Julian?”

He glanced at Julian and laughed softly, still drawing on his gloves.  In evening dress he looked curiously young and handsome, and facially less altered than the doctor had at first supposed him to be.  Still there was a difference even in the face; but it was so slight that only a keen observer would have noticed it.  The almost frigid and glacial purity had floated away from it like a lovely cloud.  Now it was unveiled, and there was something hard and staring about it.  The features were still beautiful, but their ivory lustre was gone.  A line was penciled, too, here and there.  Yet the doctor could understand that even Valentine’s own man might not appreciate the difference.  The manner, however, was more violently altered.  It was that which made the doctor think again and intensely of Cuckoo’s vague yet startling statement.

“Where did you meet Cuckoo, doctor?”

It was Julian who spoke, and the words were uttered with some excitement.

“I have met her,” Levillier replied.

It was sufficiently evident that he did not intend to say where.

But Valentine broke in: 

“She has called on you again, then, and this time found you at home.  I scarcely thought she would take the trouble.”

“Again!” the doctor said.

“Yes.  One evening when you were away I saw her at your door and ventured to give her a piece of advice.”

“And that was?”

“Not to trouble you.  I told her your patients were of a different class.”

“In that case I fear you misrepresented me, Cresswell.  I do not choose my patients.  But Cuckoo Bright is no patient of mine.”

“If she’s not ill,” Julian said, “why should she go to you?”

“That is her affair, and mine,” the doctor answered, in his quietest and most finishing tone.

Julian accepted the delicate little snub quietly, but Valentine sneered.

“Perhaps she went to seek you in your capacity of a doctor of the mind rather than of the body.  Perhaps, after all, she sought your aid.”

As he spoke the doctor could not help having driven into him the conviction that the words were spoken with meaning, that Valentine knew the nature of Cuckoo’s mission to Harley Street.  There rose in him suddenly a violent sensation of enmity against Valentine.  He strove to beat it down, but he could not.  Never had he felt such enmity against any man.  It was like the fury so obviously felt by Cuckoo.  The doctor was ashamed to be so unreasonable, and believed for a moment that the poor street-girl had absolutely swayed him, and predisposed him to this animus that surged up over his normal charity and good, clear impulses of tenderness for all that lived.

“My aid,” he said—­and the turmoil within him caused him to speak with unusual sternness.  “And if she did, what then?”