And then, in the twilight of the dingy room, and in the twilight of her eyes, he saw the flame once more.  A thin glint of sunshine found its way in from the street, and threw a shadow near them.  Cuckoo’s eyes emitted a greenish ray like a cat’s, and in this ray the flame swam and flickered, cold and pale, and, Julian fancied, menacing.

Perhaps, because he was already irritated and slightly strung up by Cuckoo’s attack, he felt a sudden anger against the flame, almost as he might have felt a rage against a person.  As he stared upon it, he could almost believe that it, too, had eyes, scrutinizing, upbraiding, condemning him, and that in the thin riband and shade of its fire there dwelt a heart to hate him for the dear sin to which, at last, he began to give himself.  For the moment Cuckoo and the flame were as one, and for the moment he feared and hated them both.

Abruptly he held up his hand to stop the further words that were fluttering on her thin and painted lips.

“Hush!” he said, in a little hiss of protest against sound.

For again, fighting with the anger, there was awe in his heart.

There was something unusual in his expression which held her silent, a furtive horror and expectation which she did not understand.  And while she waited, Julian turned suddenly, and left the room and the house.

CHAPTER VI

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS LEARNS WISDOM

Julian did not come again to the house in the Marylebone Road for at least a fortnight, and during that time the lady of the feathers was left alone with her life and with her sad thoughts.  The summer days went heavily by, and the sultry summer nights.  No rain fell, and London was veiled in dust.  The pavements were so hot that they burned the feet that trod them.  Sometimes they seemed to burn Cuckoo’s very soul, and to sear her heart as she stood upon them for hours in the night, while the crowds of Piccadilly flitted by like shadows in an evil dream.  She stared mechanically at the faces of those passing as she strolled with a lagging footstep along the line of houses.  She turned to meet the eyes of the pale-faced loungers in the lighted entrance of the St. James’s restaurant, “Jimmy’s,” as she called it.  But her mind was preoccupied.  A problem had fastened upon it with the tenacity of some vampire or strange clinging creature of night.  Cuckoo was wrestling with an angel; or was it a devil?  And often, when she stopped on the pavement and exchanged a word or two with some casual stranger, she scarcely knew what she said, or to what kind of man she was speaking.  She was possessed by one thought, the thought of Julian and of his danger.  Valentine, in her thoughts, was strangely a pale shadow, incredibly evil, incredibly persistent, luring Julian downwards, beckoning him with the thin hand of a saint to depths unpierced by the gaze of even the most sinful.  And that hand of the saint was only part of the appalling deception of his beautiful and tragically lying body, a crystal temple in which a demon dwelt secretly, peering from its concealment through the shadowy blue windows, in which Julian saw truth and honour, but in which Cuckoo read things to terrify and to dismay.