“Have you nothing more to tell me?” he said at last.

“Eh?”

She put down her hand slowly and turned her eyes on him.

“What do you wish me to do?” he said, “I do not know yet what may—­” he checked himself and substituted, “I must go and see my friends.”

“Yes, go.”

She nodded her head slowly, and then she shivered as she sat in the chair.

“Go, and do somethin’,” she said.  “I would—­I want to—­but I can’t.  It’s true, I suppose, what he said.  I’m nearly done with, I’m spoilt.  I say, you’re a doctor, aren’t you?  You know things?  Tell me then, do, what’s the good of goin’ on being able to feel—­I mean to feel just like anybody, anybody as hasn’t gone down, you know—­if you can’t do anythin’ the same as they can, get round anybody to make ’em go right?  I could send him right, I could, as well as any girl, if feelin’ ’d only do it.  But feelin’ ain’t a bit of good.  It’s looks, I suppose.  Everythin’ ’s looks.”

“No, not everything,” the doctor said.

Cuckoo’s speech both interested and touched him.  Its confused wistfulness came straight from the heart.  And then it recalled to the doctor a conversation he had had with Valentine, when they talked over the extraordinary influence that the mere appearance—­will working through features—­of one man or woman can have over another.  The doctor could only at present rather dimly apprehend the feeling entertained for Julian by Cuckoo.  But as he glanced at her, he understood very well the pathos of the contest raging at present between her heart and the painted shell which held it.

“Nobody who feels goodness is utterly bereft of the power of bringing good to another,” he said.  “For we can seldom really feel what we can never really be.”

Light shone through the shadows of the tired face at the words.

“He said different from that,” she exclaimed.

“He—­who?”

“Him as you call Valentine.  That’s why he told me all about it, because he knew as I shouldn’t understand, and because he thinks I can’t do nothin’ for any one.  But I say, you do somethin’ for Julian, will you, will you?”

There was a passion of pleading in her voice.  She had lost her fear of him, and, stretching out her hand, touched the sleeve of his coat.

“I don’t understand it all,” the doctor said.  “I don’t like to accept what you say about Mr. Cresswell, even in thought.  But I will go and see him, and Julian.  The dogs,” he added in a low and secret voice to himself.  “There is something terribly strange in all this.”

He fell into a silence of consideration that lasted longer than he knew.  The lady of the feathers began to fidget in it uneasily.  She felt that her mission was perhaps accomplished and that she ought to go.  She looked across at the doctor, pulled her silk gloves up on her thin arms, and kicked one foot against the other.  He did not seem to notice.  She glanced towards the window.  The fog was pressing its face against the glass like a dreary and terrible person looking upon them with haggard eyes.  It was time, she supposed, for her to drift out into the arms that belonged to that dreary and terrible face.  She got up.