life to be a thing of mingled enjoyments, now rejoicing in the leaping desires of the body, now disregarding them for the aspirations and clear contentments of the mind.  It seemed vengeful, like a man long kept fasting against his will, and having at last come into its empire made that empire an autocracy, a tyranny.  Julian had passed at a step from one extreme to another, and had already so lost the habit of following any mental process to a conclusion that he could no longer think clearly with ease, or observe himself with any acuteness.  He was for the time all body, knew his muscles, his flesh, his limbs, like intimates; his mind only distantly, like a stranger.  With passion, with greed, he had seized on all those pleasures which he had previously feared and shunned, until his brain was heavy as is the brain of a glutton and a drunkard, and his mind stepped in any direction with a languid lethargy.  So to-night he had the face of a man puzzled as he walked in the frost under the stars.

Once the hint of some power lurking in Cuckoo had thrilled and awed him, as only a certain clearness—­a certain receptive, appreciative clearness—­can be thrilled and awed.  Now the abrupt development of that power almost distressed, because it confused him.  He had gone down lower in the interval between the two possibilities of sensation.

“What the devil’s come over Cuckoo?” so ran his thought with a schoolboy gait.  That something had come over her he recognized.  She was no longer the girl he had stared at in Piccadilly, the creature he had pitied in the twilight hour of their first friendly interview.  Nor was she the woman whose soul he had injured by his cruel whim, the woman who had beaten him with reproaches, and made him for an instant almost ashamed of his lusts.  All these humanities perhaps slept, or woke, in her still.  Yet it was not they which heavily concerned him on his way to the Marble Arch.  There is a vitality about power of whatever kind that makes itself instantly felt, even when it is not understood, even when it is neither beloved nor appreciated.  Julian was confused by his dull and sudden recognition of power in Cuckoo.  No longer did it flash upon him, a mystery of flame in her eyes, moving him to the awe and the constraint that a man may feel at sight of an unearthly thing, a phantom, or a vision of the night. (He had looked for the flame in her eyes, and he had not found it.) But it glowed upon him more steadily, with a warmth of humanity, of something inherent, rooted, not detached, and merely for the moment and as if by chance prisoned in some particular place, from which at a breath it might escape.  It drew him to Cuckoo, and at the same time it slightly repelled him, the latter—­though Julian did not know it—­by the sharp abruptness of its novelty.  For the doctor had lit a blaze of strength in the girl by a word.  Julian’s eyes were dazzled by the blaze.  Custom might teach them to face it more calmly.  At present