It seemed as if the whole affair was going completely out of the doctor’s knowledge, and that even Cuckoo had no longer any power of attraction for Julian.  The doctor wrote to her and received an ill-spelt answer, telling him that Julian had not been near her since the last night of the year.  In this event the doctor’s only hope lay in keeping closely in touch with Valentine.  To do this proved an easy matter.  Valentine responded readily to his invitations, asked him out in return, seemed glad to be with him.  The doctor believed he read the reason of this joy in Valentine’s anxiety to prove the depth of Julian’s degradation.  He had now begun to play devilishly upon a pathetic stop, and sought every occasion to descant upon the social ruin that was overtaking Julian, and his deep concern in the matter.  This hypocrisy was so transparent and so offensive that there were moments when it stank in the doctor’s nostrils, and he could scarcely repress his horror and disgust.  Yet to show them would be not only impolitic, but would only add fuel to the flames of Valentine’s pyre of triumph.  So the doctor, too, sought to play his part, and never wearied in seeking Julian, although his quest was in vain.  From Valentine he gathered that Julian was now dropped even by the gay world; that his clubs looked askance at him; that men began to shun him, and to whisper against him.

“The stone is going down in the sea,” Valentine said.

“Who threw it into the sea?” the doctor asked.  “Tell me that.”

Valentine shrugged whimsical shoulders.

“Fate, I suppose,” he answered.  “Fate is a mischievous boy, and is always throwing stones.  Is the lady of the feathers disconsolate?”

The doctor did not trust himself to reply, but was silent, plotting another meeting to sit.  For he had begun, still magic-bound perhaps, to divine some possible salvation in that act which he had once condemned, led, as he thought, by knowledge and by experience, of the nervous system forsooth!  Now he was led unscientifically by pure feeling, like a child by a warm, close hand.  The instinct that had guided Cuckoo seemed to stretch out fingers to him.  He must respond.  But how to reach Julian?  While he strove to solve this problem it was solved for him in a manner utterly surprising to him, although engineered by words of his.

Cuckoo wrought a strange work with the skeleton hands of hunger and of pain.

CHAPTER VI

THE SELLING OF JESSIE

One chill morning of earliest February, a stirring of Jessie at the foot of her bed wakened Cuckoo from a short and uneasy sleep.  She opened her eyes to the faint light that filtered through the green Venetian blind.  Jessie moved again, slowly rotating like a drowsy top, then suddenly dropped into the warm centre of a nest of bedclothes, breathing a big dog-sigh of satisfaction that shook her tiny frame.