“Oh, I see; that’s it.”

Valentine again broke into laughter.

“You see, do you?” he said.  “You see that, but do you see the truth of what I told you before about the connection of the will with the body?  Do you see why you have no power now, can never have power again?  Do you understand that the wreck of your body inevitably causes the wreck of your will, so that it really dies and ceases, because it can no more influence others?  Do you understand that?  I’ll make you understand it now.  Come here.”

He got up from his chair and seized her two hands in his, dragging her almost violently up from the sofa.  Her fear of him, always lurking near, came upon her with a rush at the contact of his hands, and she hung back, moved by an irresistible repulsion.  The slight and momentary struggle between them caused her hair, carelessly turned up and loosely pinned, to come down.  It fell all round her in a loose shock of unnatural colour.  Valentine’s hands were strong, and Cuckoo soon felt that resistance was useless.  She let her body yield, and he drew her in front of the glass that stood over the mantelpiece.  Pushing back the table behind them, he made her stand still in the unwinking glare of the three gas-jets, which she had herself turned up earlier in the evening.

“Look there!” he cried; “look at yourself well!  How can you have power over anybody?”

Their two faces, set close together as in a frame, stared at them from the mirror, and Cuckoo—­forced to obedience—­examined them as if indeed they were a picture.  She saw the man’s face, fair, beautiful, refined, triumphant, full of the courage that is based upon experience of itself and of its deeds and possibilities, full of a strange excitement that filled the face with amazingly vivid expression.  She saw the bright blue eyes gazing at her, the red lips of the mouth curved in a smile.  There was health in the face as well as thought.  And there was power, which is greater than health, more beautiful even than beauty.  And then she turned her eyes to the face’s companion.  Thin, sharp, faded, it met her eyes, half-shrouded in the thick, tumbled hair that shone in the mirror with the peculiar frigid glare that can only be imparted by a chemical dye, and can never be simulated by nature.  One cheek was chalk-white.  The other, which had been pressed against the horsehair of the sofa, showed a harsh, scarlet patch.  All the varying haggard expressions of the world seemed crowding in the eyes of this scarecrow, and peering beneath the thickly blackened eyelashes that struck a violent discord against the yellow hair.  The thin lips of the mouth were pressed together in an expression of pain, fear, and weariness.  Shadows slept under the eyes where the face had fallen into hollows.  To-night there seemed no vestige of prettiness in those peaked features.  Nothing of health, youth, gaiety, or even girlhood, was written in them, but only a terrible, a brutal record of spoliation and of wreckage, of plunder, and of despair.  And the gaslight, striking the flat surface of the mirror, made the record glitter with a thin, cheap sparkle, like the tinsel trappings of the life whose story the mirror revealed in its reflection.