It was the voice of Valentine that spoke.  The doctor, by an effort so painful that the memory of it remained with him to the end of his life, recalled his mind from its journey.

“Trembling!” he said.  “What do you mean?  I am all right.  I am quietly in my place.  How long have we been sitting?”

“An immense time I fancy.  It seems fruitless, Julian!”

“Yes.”

Julian’s voice sounded heavy and weary.

“Don’t you think we had better stop?”

“If you like.”

Valentine got up and turned on the light.

Then they saw that the lady of the feathers, leaning back in her chair, was fallen asleep, no doubt from sheer weariness.  Her face was very white, and in sleep its expression had become ethereal and purified.  Her thin hands still rested nervelessly upon the table.  She seemed like a little child that had known sorrow early, and sought gently to lose the sense of it in rest.

“Cuckoo,” Julian said, leaning over her, “Cuckoo!”

She stirred and woke.

“I’m awfully done,” she murmured, in her street voice.  “Pardon!”

She sat up.

“I seemed as if I was put to sleep,” she said.

“You were,” Valentine answered her.  “I willed that you should sleep.”

He looked at the doctor, and his eyes said: 

“I have had my triumph.  You witness it.”

Cuckoo reddened with anger, but she said nothing.

“Did you feel anything, Julian?” Valentine asked.

Julian looked strangely hopeless.

“Nothing,” he said.  “It’s all different from what it was; like a dead thing that used to be alive.”

It seemed as if the sitting had filled him with a dogged despair.

“A dead thing,” he repeated.

Then he went over to the spirit-stand and poured himself out more absinthe.

“And you, doctor?” said Valentine.  “What did you feel?”

“I was thinking all the time,” he said, “of other things.  Not of the table or of table-turning.”

When he and Cuckoo left the flat that night, or rather in the chill first morning of the new year, they left Julian with Valentine.

He said he would stay, speaking in the voice of a man drugged almost into uncertainty of his surroundings.

CHAPTER V

THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS STARVES

Down in her dreary kitchen, among her dingy pots and pans, Mrs. Brigg was filled with an anger that seemed to her as righteous as the anger of a Puritan against Museum-opening on Sunday.  Her ground-floor lodger was going to the bad.  Analysed, reduced to its essence, that was her feeling about the lady of the feathers.  Cuckoo had lived at number 400 for a considerable time.  Being, in some ways, easy-going, or perhaps one should say rather reckless, she had given herself with a good enough grace to be plucked