been forestalled and was practically already there.  Doubtless it did come, but no one was much the wiser.  The lamps had been alight all day, and no procession of gloomy things, advancing from whithersoever, could have added much to the volume of the crowding darkness, or have appreciably increased its density.  In the darkness the cold gathered, and the frost began to take a harder grip of everything,—­of desolate, solitary pumps in tiny and squalid back yards, of pipes that crawled like liver-coloured snakes over the unpresentable sides of houses, of pools thick with orange-brown mud, and vagrant bushes creaking above the grimy earth in places that children named gardens.

Fog and frost had taken a strong grip, too, upon the heart of the lady of the feathers.  Somewhere about eleven o’clock in the morning she had stirred wearily in her bed, had stretched out her arms to the stagnant air of the room, and crouched up on her pillow in a grotesque hump.  For a while the hump remained motionless.  Then Cuckoo rolled round and extended a bare thin leg to test the atmosphere.  The leg was quickly withdrawn, the atmosphere having been evidently tried in the balance and found wanting.  Cuckoo’s bell rang, and Mrs. Brigg was called for tea and toast, while once more the hump decorated the upper part of the disordered bed.  Jessie, awakened in her basket at the foot of the bed, joined the hump, whining a greeting, and wriggling furiously in an effort to tunnel her way to the ultimate depths of sheets and blankets.  Then Mrs. Brigg, of yellowish and bleak aspect, beneath a tumbled appurtenance that she called a cap, appeared with a tray.

“Going to stop abed?” she asked, in a husky voice, in which the smuts seemed floating.

“Yes.  What’s there to get up for?” Cuckoo groaned.

“Nothun’ as I know of.”

And Mrs. Brigg was gone about her business.

All the morning Cuckoo lay staring at the blank square of the window, and Jessie snored under the blankets.  The tea was drunk, the toast lay about in fragments.  One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo’s every movement with uncompromising grittiness.  No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it.  The bed seemed full of hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid upon her by this slight evil.  But, indeed, the horror of her existence reached a culminating point to-day,—­a point of loneliness, vacant dreariness, squalor, and degradation that could not be surpassed.  The preceding night had been peculiarly horrible, and as Cuckoo now lay on the tumbled bed, in the dim, cold room, with the fog gazing in, the leaden hours of winter crawling by, she felt as if she could bear no more.  She could bear no more addition to her sick weariness; no more addition to her useless hunger of love for Julian, that could never be crowned with anything