at a waterwheel, the soprano ballad of a warbling hotel English lady, and the remote and throbbing roar of a savage Soudanese hymn and beaten drums from the golden Eastern night?  There you have nature, toil, shrill civilization and war claiming you with one effort in a sad and sweet country.  Or have you, in a bright and dewy morning, heard the “murmur of folk at their prayers,” the drone of a church organ, and, beyond the hedgerow, two graceless lovers quarrelling, and an atheist, leaning over the church gate, sneering to his fellow at the devotion of deluded Sabbath-keepers?  There you have love of the hidden and faith, love of the visible and distrust, hatred of hidden love and faithlessness, making a symphony for you.  Such mingled music is strange—­strange as life.  But to the doctor the music of this girl, Cuckoo, in the dark seemed stranger and more eerie far.  Her mind sang to him of a thousand things in a moment, as is the fashion of women.  Only men normally hear but one, at most two or three, of the many feminine melodies.  And now Doctor Levillier heard them all, as a man may hear those differing songs already recounted, simultaneously and clearly.  Degradation and the hopelessness that catches it by the hand, passion and the strength and purity of passion, hatred, fear, physical fatigue, ignorant nervousness, grossness of the gutter, which will cling even to a soul capable of great devotion and noble effort, and accompany it on the upward journey, very far and very high, resolve and shrinking, mere street-boy virulence of enmity, and mere angel tenderness of pity—­all these sang their song from the mind and heart of Cuckoo to the mind and heart of the doctor.  It was a chorus of women in one woman, as it so often is in the dearest women we know.  In that choir a harlot sat, hating, by a girl who was all love and reverence.  And they sang out of the same hymn-book.  Jenny joined her voice with Susannah, Mary Magdalene with Mary Mother, so near together in one thing, so far apart in another—­alike in this, that both were singing.  And in that choir—­celestial and infernal—­sang the jealous woman with grey cheeks and haggard eyes, and the timorous woman, and she of the fearless face, and the woman who could scale the stars for the creature she worshipped, and the woman who could lie down in the mud and let the world see her there, and the woman who had sold her soul for food, and a thin woman, such a thin, almost transparent, wistful creature, who was facing the thing men call with bated breath—­starvation.  She sang too, but, of all these women, she was the only one the doctor could not rightly hear nor rightly see.  For she, as yet, was remote, far down the level line of that choir, hardly perhaps one with it yet, faint of voice, dim of outline.

The doctor heard the choir sing, and then—­