expectant.  And then—?  Mrs. Brigg had lit the fire, but it had spluttered out into a mass of blackened, ghostly paper and skeleton sticks.  A little more battle in the relighting of it.  But then—­the blank day of the girl of the streets.  Cuckoo sat down, watched the growing fire, and wondered what she had expected.  She was conscious that she had expected something, and something not small.  Her mood had demanded it.  But our moods are often like disappointed brigands, who, having waylaid a pauper, demand with levelled pistols that which the pauper has so vainly prayed for all his life.  Moods come from within.  They are not evoked to dance valses with suitable partners from without.  And so Cuckoo’s strong excitement and energy found nothing to dance with.  She sat there growing gradually less alive, and wondering why she had hastened to get up; why she was fully dressed instead of wrapped in the usual staring pink dressing-gown with the chiffon cascades down the front.  Mornings were of no use to her—­never had been.  God might as well never have included them in the scheme of His days, so far as she was concerned.  But this morning she had thought, had felt—­it seemed impossible that she should feel so unusual and that nothing should happen.  She was ready, but Fate was in bed and asleep.  That was really the gist of the feeling that came over her.  She thought of Dr. Levillier, the man who had set a torch at last to her nature and fired it with a new ardour.  He was at his work in the morning, seeing, speaking to, that passing line of strangers, who walked on forever through his life.  His energies were employed.  Perhaps he had forgotten Cuckoo and her empty mornings.  Almost for the first time in her life the lady of the feathers definitely longed for a legitimate occupation.  How she could have flown at it to-day.  But already the bright mood was fading.  It could not last in such an atmosphere.  As Cuckoo had said, she could fight better than she could pray.  But it seemed to her, after a while, that there was only room in this cheerless, dark house to pray, no room at all to fight.  She tried reading yesterday’s evening paper, left on the horsehair sofa by Julian.  But reading had never been a favourite occupation of hers, and to-day she wanted to save Julian, to make him love her, and so to win him from Valentine.  She did not want to sit in the twilight of a winter’s day reading about people she had never seen, things she did not understand.  And she threw the paper down.

To make Julian love her.  Cuckoo flushed, yes, even sitting there quite alone, for Jessie had retired to the warmth of the bedroom blankets, as she said it in her mind.  The doctor had told her to do so.  Her heart had told her to try to do it long ago.  But she trusted the doctor and she did not trust her heart.  And how could she trust her power to make Julian love her?  Cuckoo had once known very well how to make a man desire her.  In the very early days of her career she had been a very pretty