“We must counteract the exciting effects of our café noir,” Valentine said, addressing his guests in a group.  “Otherwise we shall be strung up to a pitch of tension that will make us think the requiem of church bells, which we shall hear in a few minutes, the voices of spirits or of spectres.  Julian, here is your absinthe.  What will you drink, Miss Bright?  Brandy, lemonade, whiskey?”

“Lemonade, please,” Cuckoo said, almost in a whisper.

The tears were crowding in her eyes.  She dared not look Julian in the face.  Never before had her past risen up before her painted in such grim and undying colours.  The reprise of Valentine had been as the reprise of a Maxim gun to a volley fired by a child from an air-tube.  So Cuckoo felt.  But how greatly was she deceived!  Perhaps physical conditions played a subtle part in the terrible desolation that seized her now, after her outburst of daring and of excitement.  The warmth and smallness of the room, the penetrating scent that filled it, even the movements of her companions, the sound of their voices, suddenly became almost insupportable to Cuckoo.  She was the victim of a reaction that was so swift and so intense as to be unnatural.  And in it both her mind and body were bound in chains.  Then she was petrified.  Her very heart felt cold and cramped, and then hard, icy, inhuman.  Her tears did not fall, but were dried up in her eyes, like dew by a scorching sun.  She looked at Julian, and felt as indifferent towards him as if he had been a shadow on the grass in the evening time.  Then he became remote, with a removedness attained by no shadow even.  For a shadow is in the world, and Julian seemed beyond the world to Cuckoo.  She thought, even repeated, with tiny lip-movements, the cruel words of Valentine, and they seemed to her no longer cruel, or of any meaning, bad or good.  For they came from too far away.  They were as a cry of shrill music from a cave leagues onward beyond the caves of any winds.

Valentine poured out some lemonade and gave it to her.  She accepted it mechanically.  She even put it to her lips and drank some of it.  But her palate was aware of no flavour, no coolness of liquid.  And she continued sipping without tasting anything.

Meanwhile Julian was saying to Valentine: 

“I don’t think I’ll take any absinthe to-night.  Give me some lemonade too.”

“Lemonade for you?  Nonsense.  I ordered the absinthe specially.  You must have some.  Here it is.”

As he spoke he poured some of the opalescent liquid into a tumbler and handed it to Julian.  While he did so his eyes were on the doctor and they gleamed again with a sort of audacity or triumph.  He seemed recovering himself, returning to his former mood and veiled intentions.  And Doctor Levillier thought he saw the flame of Valentine’s soul glow more deeply and fiercely.  The three men, as if with one accord, ignored the lady of the feathers at this