The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet; the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action, she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the doctor’s trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer, incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that encompasses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human lives with mystery.  She looked up at him with this world of mingling knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling sensation of frigid awe.

“What—­what?” he began.  Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly away.

“Sit down, doctor.  Do you like my flowers?  Julian, are you still tired?  The coffee will wake you up.  A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar?  Here are the matches.”

Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo.  His unnatural lethargy was gradually passing away into a more explicable fatigue, no longer speechless.  Leaning on his elbow, he looked into her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim pathos.  It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during the evening was still Cuckoo’s confusion over her own misunderstanding at dinner, for he now again referred to it.

“Have they been chaffing you, Cuckoo?” he said, striking a match on the heel of his shoe and lighting a cigarette.  “Have they been worrying you?  Never mind.  It’s only Val’s fun.  He doesn’t mean anything by it.  I say, how awfully pale you look to-night, and thin.”

He paused, considering her with a glance that was almost severe.

“I’m all right,” said Cuckoo, trying to repress the agitation she always felt now when speaking to Julian.  “I ain’t ill.  Why don’t you come to see me now?” she added.  “You don’t never come.”

Julian glanced over to Valentine, who was standing by the hearth talking to the doctor, who sat in an armchair.

“I’ve been busy,” he said.  “I’ve had a lot of things to do.  Do you miss me, Cuckoo, when I don’t come?”

“Yes,” she replied, but without softness.  Then she added, lowering her voice almost to a whisper: 

“Don’t he want you to come?”

Julian did not reply, but puffed rather moodily at his cigarette, glancing towards Valentine.  He was thinking of the conversation at the Savoy and of the antagonism between Valentine and Cuckoo.  Suddenly there came into his mind a dull wish to reconcile these two on the last night of the year, to—­in Valentine’s own words—­bury the hatchet.  He sat meditating over his plan and trying to revolve different and dramatic methods of accomplishing it.  Presently he said: 

“Cuckoo, you and Val have got to be friends from to-night.”