“Make believe!” cried Cuckoo, childishly.

“Exactly.”

“What about?”

“I want you to ‘make believe’ that Mr. Cresswell is not himself—­is not sane.”

“O-oh-h!” said Cuckoo, with a long intonation of surprise.

“I do honestly believe it; you are to pretend to believe it.  Now, remember that.”

“All right.”

“You are not to contradict any more, you see.”

“Oh,” began Cuckoo, in sudden distress.  “Pardon.  I didn’t—­”

“Hush!  That’s all right.  Act with me on the make-believe or assumption that Mr. Cresswell is not himself at present.”

“Ah, but that ain’t no make-believe.  He told me as he wasn’t himself when he says, ‘I am Marr.’”

“Yes—­yes,” said the doctor.  Secretly, almost angrily, he said to himself that Valentine, in some access of insanity, had actually confessed to the lady of the feathers that he knew himself to be mad.

“He says he ain’t himself,” she repeated again, with an eager feeling that perhaps, at last, she had got at the right interpretation of the gospel of Valentine.

“That is practically the same thing as his saying to you that he was mad.  Now you have told me what you feel for Julian.”

Cuckoo flushed, and muttered something unintelligible, twining her hands in the sables till she nearly pulled them from Doctor Levillier’s knees.

“And you have seen the terrible change that has come over him, and that is fast, fast deepening to something that must end in utter ruin.  You have not seen him these last few days, I think.”

“No”, said Cuckoo, her eyes fixed hungrily on the doctor’s face.  She began to tug at her veil.  “What’s it?  Is he—­is he?”

She collapsed into a nervous silence, still tugging with a futile hand at the veil, which remained implacably stretched across her face.  The doctor looked at her, and said steadily: 

“He has gone a little further—­down.  You understand me?”

“I ought to,” she said, bitterly.

“As you are mounting upward,” the doctor rejoined, with a kind and firm gravity that seemed indeed to lift Cuckoo, as a sweet wind lifts a feather and sends it on high.

The bitterness went out of her face, but she said nothing, only sat listening attentively while the doctor went on: 

“My belief is this, and if you hold it you can perhaps act in this matter with more boldness, more fearlessness, than if you do not hold it.  I believe that Mr. Cresswell, who played very foolish tricks with his nerves some time ago, just before he got to know you, has become mad to this extent, that he believes himself to have a power of will unlike that possessed by any other man,—­an inhuman power, in fact.  He fancies that he has the will of a sort of god, and he wishes to prove this to himself more especially.  Everything is for self in a madman.  Now he looks about for a means of proving that his