date from that night.  Since the death of Rip the doctor had formed the opinion that Valentine was no longer perfectly sane.  His excitement, the fury of his eyes when he spoke of the triumphs of will, seemed to give the clue to his transformation.  The insane perpetually glorify themselves, and are transcendent egoists.  Surely the egoism of insanity had peeped out in Valentine’s diatribe upon the eternity of a strong man’s individual will.  The night of the trance had been a strange crisis of his life.  He had seemed to recover from it, to come back from that wonderful simulation of death healthy, calm, reasonable as before.  This might have been only seeming.  In that sleep the sane and beautiful Valentine might have died, the insane and unbeautiful Valentine have been born.  There are many instances of a sudden and acute shock to the nervous system leaving an indelible and dreary writing upon the nature.  If Valentine had thus been tossed to madness, it was very possible that his dog, an instinctive creature, should recognize the change with terror.  It was even possible that other instinctive creatures should divine the hideous mind of a maniac hidden in the beautiful body of an apparently normal man.  And Cuckoo, she too was instinctive, a girl without education, culture, the reading that opens the mind and sometimes shuts the eyes.  Cuckoo Bright, she had divined the evil of Valentine.  To her he had made confession.  In her eyes Julian had seen the mysterious flame.  Some influence from her had kept him from his invited guests and from his house.  Yes, Cuckoo, the lady of the feathers, the blessed damozel of Regent Street and Piccadilly Circus, the painted and possessed, faded and degraded, wanderer of the pavements, seemed to become the centre of this wheel of circumstances, as Doctor Levillier reflected upon her.

It was time for him to go to Cuckoo.  Julian’s descent must be stayed, before he went down, like a new Orpheus without a mission, into Hades.  Valentine’s influence, whether mad or sane, must be fought.  It was to be a struggle, a battle of wills, of what Valentine chose to consider souls.  And some prompting led the doctor to think of Cuckoo as a possible weapon.  Why?  Because she had even once held Julian against his will, against the intention of his soul.

So the doctor at length sought the lady of the feathers.  She had been passing through a period of great and benumbing desolation, believing that her last appeal, her great effort for Julian, had been a failure.  For the doctor had not come to her, and Cuckoo could not tell that he was making observations for himself and that she was often in his mind.  She supposed that he, like all others, laughed at her pretensions to gravity, swept her exhibition of real and honest emotion away from his memory with a sneer, considered her despair over another’s ruin a vile travesty, a grinning absurdity and trick.  Never had Cuckoo felt more lonely than in these days, though a vast