Valentine was right in his supposition that both the lady of the feathers and the doctor would accept his invitation, but he did not understand the precise motive which prompted their acceptance.  Nor did he much care to understand it.  Cuckoo, Doctor Levillier!  After all, what were they to him now?  Spectators of his triumph.  Interesting, therefore, to a certain extent, as an unpaying audience may be interesting to an actor.  Interesting, inasmuch as they could contribute to swell the bladder of his vanity, and follow in procession behind his chariot wheels.  But he no longer cared to divine the shades of their emotions, or to busy himself in fathoming their exact mental attitudes in relation to himself.  So he thought, touched perhaps with a certain delirium, though not with the delirium of insanity attributed to him by Doctor Levillier.

The doctor had intended celebrating the last night of the year in Harley Street with Cuckoo and the two young men.  The refusal of the latter put an end to the opening of his plan of campaign in this strange battle, and he was greatly astonished when he received Valentine’s invitation.  Still, he had no hesitation in accepting it.

“So,” he said to himself, as he read the note, “we join issue within the very wall of the enemy.  Poor, deluded, twisted Valentine! that I should have to call him, to think of him as an enemy!  We begin the fight within the shadow of our opponent’s tent.”

Literally that was the fact.

Cuckoo’s thoughts were less definite, more tinged with passion, less shaped by the hands of intellect.  They were as clouds, looming large, yet misty, hanging loose in torn fragments now, and now merging into indistinguishable fog that yet seemed pregnant with possibilities.  Poor thoughts, vague thoughts; yet they pressed upon her brain until her tired head ached.  And they stole down to her heart, and that ached too, and hoped and then despaired—­then hoped again.

CHAPTER II

CAFÉ NOIR

Snow fell, melodramatically, on the year’s death-night.  During the day Valentine occupied himself oddly in decorating his flat for the evening.  But although he thus seemed to fall in with the consecrated humours of the season his decorations would scarcely have commanded the approval of those good English folk who think that no plant is genial unless it is prickly, and that prickly things represent appropriately to the eye the inward peace and good will that grows, like a cactus, perhaps within the heart.  He did not put holly rigidly above his doors.  No mistletoe drooped from the apex of the tentroom.  Instead, he filled his flat with flowers, brought from English conservatories or from abroad.  Crowds of strange and spotted orchids stood together in the drawing-room, staring upon the hurly-burly of furniture and ornaments.  In the corners of the room were immense red flowers, such as hang among the crawling green jungles of the