“It’ll be all right, you know that?” said the lady of the feathers.

“Yes, I know that,” he answered.  “You have to fight, I feel that; only you can do it.  You have to fight this—­this—­” and here the doctor’s loyalty spoke, for he could not betray even this new Valentine,—­“this strange madness of Valentine’s.  Pit your will against his, and conquer for Julian’s sake.”

“Will,” said Cuckoo.  “That’s what he says I can’t have.”

“Won’t you pray to have it given you?” said the little doctor.

Cuckoo looked at him, wondering.  Then she said: 

“I believe I could fight better ’n pray.”

“Sometimes battle is the greatest of all prayers,” said the doctor.

The iron gate clicked.  He was gone.  Cuckoo cast an oblique glance up at the stars before she shut the door, and retraced her steps down the passage.

CHAPTER VII

BATTLE ARRAY

When Julian left the Marylebone Road that night it was nearly ten o’clock.  He was quite sober, and looked preternaturally grave as he opened the little gate and stepped out into the frost-bound street.  In the lighted aperture of the doorway behind him Cuckoo stood like a shadow half revealed peeping after him, and he turned and waved his hand to her.  Then he walked away slowly, meditating.  That night the fight for the possession of his will, his soul, had begun in deadly earnest.  He did not know it, yet he was vaguely aware that he began to move in the midst of unwonted circumstances.  Cuckoo had not been able wholly to conceal from him her strong mental excitement.  Since her conversation with the doctor she had become a different woman.  For the one word had been spoken which could change weakness into strength, utter self-distrust into something that at least resembled self-reliance.  The doctor had broken Valentine’s spell over Cuckoo with that word.  He believed in her.  He told her to fight.  He assumed that she had some power, even more power for Julian than he had.  “Only you can do it,” he had said.  The sentence armed her from head to foot, put weapons in her hands, light in her hollow eyes, a leaping exultation in her heart.  The flickering power that she had marvelled at, and then despaired of, burnt up at last into a strong flame.  That evening it had dazzled Julian’s eyes.  He seemed to see a new Cuckoo, and he was thinking of her as he walked along now in the frost under the stars.  His meditation was not very intellectual or very profound, for since the change in his life Julian had put his old intellectualities away from him.  Passion, so long guarded, so bravely repressed, once it had broken loose stormed all the heights of his nature, and drove every sentiment that tried to oppose it into exile.  The animalism that is so generally present in a boy physically strong took possession of him, and would not tolerate any divided allegiance.  It declined to permit his