By day Cuckoo sat in her stuffy little parlour brooding wearily.  She waited in day after day, always hoping that Julian would return, full of resolutions, prompted by fear, to be gentle, even lively, to him when he did come, full of excited intention which could not be fulfilled; for he did not come.  And by night, while she tramped the streets, still Cuckoo’s anxious mind revolved the question of her behaviour in the future.  For she would not, passionately would not, allow herself to contemplate the possibility that Julian’s anger against her would keep him forever beyond reach either of her fury or of her tenderness.  She insisted on contemplating his ultimate reappearance, and her wits were at work to devise means to win him from Valentine’s influence without stirring his horror at any thought of disloyalty to his friend.  Cuckoo, in fact, wanted to be subtle, intended to be subtle, and sought intensely the right way of subtlety.  She sought it as she walked, as she hovered at street corners in the night, while the hours ran by, sometimes till the streets were nearly deserted, sometimes even till the dawn sang in the sky to the wail of the hungry woman beneath it.  She sought it even in the company of those strangers who stepped for a night into her life as into a public room, and stepped from it on the morrow with a careless and everlasting adieu, half-drowned in the chink of money.

And sometimes she thought, with a sick dreariness, that she would never find it, and sometimes courage failed her, and, despite her passionate resolution, she did for a moment say to herself, “If he should never come again.”  There were moments, too, when every other feeling was drowned by sheer jealousy of Julian, when the tiger-cat woke in this street-girl who had always had to fight, when her thin frame shivered with the shaking violence of the soul it held.  Then she clenched her hands, and longed to plant her nails in the faces of those other women, divined, though never seen,—­those French women who had sung him, like sirens, to Paris, away from the sea of her greedy love.  Her similes were commonplace.  In her heart she called such sirens hussies.  Had she met them the battle of words would have been strong and singularly unclean.  That she herself was a hussy to other men, not to Julian, did not trouble her.  She did not realize it.  Human nature has always one blind eye, even when the other does not squint.  This passion of jealousy, circling round an absent man, seized her at the strangest, the most inopportune moments.  Sometimes it came upon her in the street, and the meditation of it was so vital and complete that Cuckoo could not go on walking, lest she should, by movement, miss the keenest edge of the agony.  Then she would stop wherever she was, lean against the down-drawn shutter of a shop, or the corner of a public house, among the gaping loungers, let her powdered chin drop upon her breast, and sink into a fit of desperate detective duty, during which she followed Julian like a shadow through imagined wanderings, and watched him committing all those imagined actions that could cause her to feel the wildest and most inhuman despair.