loneliness is the constant companion of her large sisterhood.  Even Jessie failed to comfort her, and she could find little courage within herself.  And yet there were moments when the vigour that had led her once to defy Valentine, when the fire that had sprung up in her, as a flame may burst forth in a swamp, seemed to be near to her again.  She felt a new possibility within her, stirring, striving.  It was at such moments that she longed to see the doctor, and could have cursed him for not coming to her.  For at such moments she seemed only waiting for a touch of sympathy, a word of encouragement, to perform some great action, some momentous deed.  But the touch, the word, were lacking, and her life and experience of constant and monotonous degradation dulled the impulse, stifled the enthusiasm that she could not understand.  And she fell again to brooding, and to an ignorant and vague consciousness of impotence.

She bought a new hair-dye, painted her thin cheeks more heavily than ever before, and sought, almost with a wild exultation that swiftly fled away, to sink lower.

The monotony of sin is one of the scourges of sin.  In those days Cuckoo suffered many stripes.  Her eyes grew more weary, her smile in Piccadilly more mechanical, her walk more puppet-like than ever.  Life was like a moving dream of horror.  And yet no day passed without a gleam of that strange sensation of ignorant power, fluttering upward, fading away, pausing, passing, dead.

She did not know what it meant.  She could not keep it nor use it.  She could not unravel its message nor rest upon its strength.  It was gone almost while it came, but it did something for the lady of the feathers.  It gave to her the little seed of expectation that, quite alone in a weary desert, yet makes of that desert the plot men call a garden.  Like a thread of steel, it held up this girl from the uttermost abyss, until at last the doctor’s hand struck upon her door.

Julian’s occasional visits were as the scourgings of God, giving to Cuckoo a vision of shifting ruin, in which she—­so she told herself, thinking of the dance of the hours—­had been the first to have a share.

It was a wintry afternoon when the doctor came.  Frost clung stealthily round the grimy black trees, outlining their naked boughs with meagre lines of white sewn with smuts.  Above the frost hung the fog as if in charge of the town, a despondent and gloomy sentinel.  During the morning the sun had lain in the fog like a faint blood-red jewel in a thick and awkward sulphur setting, but with the afternoon the jewel faded to a distant dim phantom, from that to blank nothingness.  As if satisfied with this piteous exit, the fog drew closer, keeping especially heavy watch upon the long and bleak line of the Marylebone Road, and taking the high and narrow house in which Cuckoo dwelt under its severest protection.  Twilight wanted to come as the afternoon drew on, but it had