girl.  Her old mother, who believed her dead, had often cried and said to the neighbours that her beauty had been Cuckoo’s undoing.  Thus do we lay blame on the few fine gifts that should gild our lives.  But Cuckoo had been very pretty and had soon learnt the first foul lesson of her métier, to wake swift desire.  As time went on and she wasted her gift of beauty along the pavements of London, she found this poor power failing in strength and in certainty.  As to the power of wakening that slower, deeper, kindred, yet opposed desire of love, Cuckoo had never known whether she possessed it.  She had had many lovers, but nobody to love her really, and this in days of her beauty, or at any rate her gracious prettiness.  No wonder, then, that now a chill ran over her at the thought of the task that lay before her if she was to gain her battle.  To break Valentine’s influence she had to make Julian love her.  How?  Instinctively, and with a sense of horror, she knew that her usual practised arts, instead of helping, almost fatally handicapped her now.  She loved Julian purely, so purely that she could not endure that he should meet her degradation as he had met it on that one night she never thought of but with repentance.  Yet to her ignorance, to her, rising towards purity now, yet ever steeped in the coarsest knowledge, it seemed that the thing called love could hardly utter itself save by some threadbare blandishment, or parrot combination of words, used each night by a hundred women of the town.  Cuckoo knew no language of love that was not, so to say, bad language, inasmuch as it was used by those whom she hated.  And hitherto she had been content to keep her love for Julian a silent love, except on the few occasions when she had obliquely showed it by the anger of jealousy or of reproach.  She wished nothing bodily from him, or if she did, stifled the wish in the mutely repeated record of her own unworthiness.  But now, if she was to draw his soul to hers, she must move forward, she must surely commit some sacrifice, perform some deed.  What deed could she perform?  What sacrifice could she make that would win upon him, that would alter his relation towards her from one of eccentric friendship to one of affection that might even be governed?

The lady of the feathers did not reason this all out in her mind as she sat before the spluttering fire, but she felt it, a tangled mass of thoughts, catching her brain as in a net, catching her life as in a net too.  How could she make Julian love her?  What could she do?  And all the time, as she asked herself passionately that question, the hours were gliding by towards the evening refrain of her life.  Cuckoo began to consider this evening refrain as she had never considered it before, as it might affect another if he loved her.  If she made Julian love her, if she succeeded in this attempt that seemed as if it must be impossible, what of her evening refrain then?  And what would be the conclusion of such