“I am afraid you are still scarcely yourself,” he added, with a solicitude that was too elaborate to be agreeable.  “You are looking pale and tired.  You are sure to sleep again.”

“I’ll not sleep to-night,” she answered, showing none of her usual fear of him.

The assertion of her will, her momentary rescue of Julian, Julian’s avowed love for her, his clinging to her as to a refuge—­all these things, so Cuckoo thought, built up in her a great fearlessness.  In her bodily weakness she felt strong.  Her faded, weakly frame held now a large spirit of which she was finely conscious.  And she attributed this leaping spirit, so brave, so intense to these things, these facts of which she could make a list.  She did not know that behind them all there was a motive power inspiring her, through them perhaps, but of itself.  How often is the power behind the throne unsuspected, unheeded.  Cuckoo did not recognize it in this crisis, although there had been moments in the past when the murmur of its voice had stolen upon her and stirred her to wonder and to perturdation.  And Valentine, to whom the combat came, saw not his real foe.  And Julian looked only into Cuckoo’s faded eyes for refuge, for comfort.  And Doctor Levillier—?  At present he could only wait patiently in the hope, doubtful, fragmentary of revelation.

Conversation that night was uneasy and disjointed.  Cuckoo’s defiance of Valentine was fully apparent.  Julian’s fear, obviously grown up to hatred, of his former friend shone clearly.  There was a nakedness about the manners of both tired woman and shattered man that was disquieting and unusual.  Valentine did not seem to notice it or to be moved about it.  If anything, it might be supposed to add to his pleasure an unnatural revelry in being hated.  Doctor Levillier, glancing from him to Julian, found him self-involved in remembrances of Rip and Valentine.  The terror and the hate of the dog seemed to be reproduced vividly in the terror and the hate of the man.  Valentine watched both with smiling eyes and drew draughts of power from that fountain of horror.

At last conversation failed entirely.  Julian was half stretched on the divan, gazing at Cuckoo as one who aspires to salvation.  It was apparent that he was fully awake to the terror of his own situation; that he pierced the depths of the abyss into which he had fallen, in which he lay crippled, prisoned, ruined.  Yet a hope had dawned on him with the dawning of the full knowledge of his fall, of his fantastic self-deception.  The great love in this woman’s eyes shone down into the abyss, shone from that face pinched by starvation.  There was Heaven in it.  There was the flame.  Yes, he saw it now, not literally as in the past days, when its mystery had plunged him in awe, when its presence had touched him with a great fear, but imaginatively, as men see flames of help, and of faith, and of purity, shining in the eyes of the good women they worship,