but despair; no more addition to her bodily fatigue, born of tramping monotony succeeded by yet more enervating weariness of the flesh.  She could bear no more.  Yes, but she must bear more.  For Cuckoo knew that she was not dying, was not even ill.  She was only tired in body, prostrate in heart, deserted in life, and forced to witness the quick and running ruin of the man she had the farcical absurdity to love.  Imaginative, for once, in her morbid fatigue, she began to wish that she could fade away and become part of the fog that lay about London, be drawn into its murkiness, with all her murky recollections, her fiendish knowledge, her mechanical wiles of the streets, her thin and ghostly despairs and desires.  For they seemed thin and ghostly, they too, to-day, fit food for the fog, as indeed the whole of her was.  How could such as she evaporate into sweet air, a clear heaven?

She caught at the hand-glass, leaning far out on the bed, as the blessed damozel o’er the bright bar of heaven, and tried to see, with staring eyes, how the new hair-dye that she was now using became her.  Her mind was vagrant, coming and going miserably, from that love of hers which was strangely strong and subtle, to the powder-box with its arsenic-green lid, or the rouge-pot of dirty white china.  And by each event it paused and sank, as if benumbed by the increasing frost.  Leaning again to put back the hand-glass she fell over too far and dropped it.  The glass fell face downwards and was smashed.  Cuckoo laughed aloud, revelling feebly in the additional misery a superstitious mind now began to promise her.  The fragments of broken glass actually pleased her, and, on a sudden, she resolved to set her feet in them, that she might be cut and wounded, that she might bleed outwardly as she had been bleeding inwardly for so long.  She swung her legs over the breadth of the bed, disorganizing Jessie, planted her feet in the array of glass and stood up.  As she did so the doctor mounted her doorstep, plied the knocker and rang the bell.  Cuckoo stood listening.  A fragment of glass had really penetrated the bare sole of her foot, which bled a little gently on the carpet.  But she scarcely knew it.  She heard Mrs. Brigg go by, and then steps sounding in the passage.  Then there came to her ears a quiet voice with a very characteristic note of bright calmness in it.  Standing in her frilled nightdress among the bits of glass, Cuckoo flushed scarlet all over her face and neck.  She knew who the visitor was.  With one dart she reached the washhand-stand.  Sponges, brushes, combs, all her weapons of the toilet, were immediately in commotion, and when Mrs. Brigg opened her door, the room was a whirlpool of quick activities, in the midst of which, as on a frouzy throne, Jessie stood upon the bed barking excitedly.  Mrs. Brigg came in and closed the door.  Her thin lips were pursed.

“Light the fire!” Cuckoo called at her from the basin.

“What do you want the doctor for?”