the whole menu, played with your dessert and even drunk your black coffee.  Go on, only go on.  Men and women are unhappy.  They think it is because they have done too much.  They reproach themselves for a thousand things that they have done.  Fools!  They are unhappy because they have not done enough.  The text which will haunt me on my deathbed will be:  ’I have left undone those things which I ought to have done.’  Yes, during my long cursed years of inaction, when I was called the Saint of Victoria Street.  Ah!  Julian, you and I slept; we are awake now.  You and I were dead; we are now alive.  But we are only at the beginning of our lives.  We have those years, those white and empty years, to drown in the waters of Lethe.  They are like monstrous children that should have been strangled almost ere they were born, white, vacant children.  And now, day by day, we are pressing them down in the waters with our hands.  At last they will sink.  The waves will flow over their haggard faces.  The waves will sweep them away.  Then we shall be happy.  We shall redeem those years on which the locust fed, and we shall be happy.”

“Yes, by God, we shall be happy, we will—­we will be happy.  Only teach me to be happy, Valentine, anywhere, anyhow.”

“Not with the lady of the feathers.  She will not make you happy.”

“Cuckoo?  No!  For she’s terribly unhappy herself.  Poor old Cuckoo.  I wonder what she’s doing now.”

“Searching in the snow for her fate,” Valentine said, with a sneer.

* * * * *

It was not so.  Cuckoo was sitting alone in the little room of the Marylebone Road looking a new spectre in the face, the spectre of hunger, only shadowy as yet, scarcely defined, scarcely visible.  And the lady of the feathers wondered, as she gazed, if she and the spectre must become better acquainted, clasp hands, kiss lips, be day-fellows and night-fellows.

* * * * *

“I am going to write to Cuckoo,” Julian said a day later.  “What shall I say?”

Valentine hesitated.

“What have you thought of saying?” he asked.

“Oh, I don’t know.  First one thing, then another.  Good-bye among the number.  That’s what you wish me to say, Val, isn’t it?”

He spoke in a listless voice, monotonous in inflection and lifeless in timbre.  The dominion of Valentine over him since the supper at the Savoy had increased, consolidating itself into an undoubted tyranny, which Julian accepted, carelessly, thoughtlessly, a prey to the internal degradation of his mind.  Once he had only been nobly susceptible, a fine power.  Now he was drearily weak, an ungracious disability.  But with his weakness came, as is usual, a certain lassitude which even resembled despair, an indifference peculiar to the slave, how opposed to the indifference peculiar to the autocrat.  Valentine recognized in the voice the badge of serfdom, even more than