Course succeeded course.  At last dessert was placed upon the table.  Valentine raised his glass with a smile: 

“Let us drink the health of Julian’s absence,” he said.  “For you and I get on so perfectly together.”

“Rather a cruel toast in Julian’s own rooms,” said the doctor.

“Ah, but he’s happy enough where he is.”

“You know where that is?”

“No—­I only suspect,” Valentine cried gaily.  “In the wilds of South Kensington, in a tiny house, all Morris tapestry and Burne-Jones stained glass, dwells the latest siren who has been calling to our Ulysses.  He is there, I suspect.  Wait a moment, though.  His telegram might tell us.  Where was it sent from?”

He sprang up, went to the writing-table near the window, and caught up the crumpled thin paper that he had flung down there.  Smoothing it out, he read, holding the paper close to a wax candle: 

“Handed in at the Marylebone Road office at 5:50.”

His brow clouded.

“Marylebone Road,” he repeated, looking at the doctor.  “Why should he be there?”

His words immediately set the doctor on the track.

“Does not Cuckoo Bright live there?” he said.

“Yes, she does.”

“May he not be with her?”

Valentine had dropped the telegram.  He was standing at the table, and he pressed his two fists, clenched, upon the white cloth.

“I have told him he must give Cuckoo up,” he said, almost in a snarl.

The doctor glanced at him quickly.

“You have told him?”

“Advised him, I mean.”

“You dislike her?”

“I!  No.  How can one dislike a painted rag?  How can one dislike a pink and white shell that holds nothing?”

“Every body holds a soul.  Every human shell holds its murmur of the great sea.”

“The body of Cuckoo then contains a soul that’s cankered with disease, moth-eaten with corruption, worn away to an atom not bigger than a grain of dust.  I would not call it a soul at all.”

He spoke with more than a shade of excitement, and the gay expression of his face had changed to an uneasy anger.  The doctor observed it, and rejoined quietly: 

“How can you answer for another person’s soul?  We see the body, it is true.  But are we to divine the soul from that—­wholly and solely?”

“The soul!  Let us call it the will.”

“Why?”

“The will of man is the soul of man.  It is possible to judge the will by the body.  The will of such a woman as Cuckoo Bright is a negative quantity.  Her body is the word ‘weakness,’ written in flesh and blood for all to read.”

“Ah, you speak of her will for herself,” the doctor said, thinking of Cuckoo’s broken wail to him, as she sat on that autumn evening in his consulting-room.  “But what of her will for another, her soul for another?”