“And I say you shall be.”

The wail died in Cuckoo’s throat.  The tears were arrested as by a spell.  Dr. Levillier had got upon his feet.  All the truth and tenderness of his heart was roused and quickened.  He knew real passion, real grief, and from that moment he knew and trusted the lady of the feathers.  And by the strength of her bitterness, even by the broken curses that would have shocked so many of the elect of this world, he measured the width and the depth of her possibilities.  She had sent to damnation—­what?  The vile cruelty, the loathsome, unspeakable, dastardly mercilessness of the world.  To damnation with it!  That was the loud echo in his man’s heart.

“That one night is nothing,” he said.  “Or rather it is something that you must redeem.  It is good to have to pay for a thing.  It is that makes one work.  There is a work for you to do, a work which I believe no one else can do.  You love Julian.  Love him more.  Make him love you.  My will cannot fight the will of Valentine over him.  No man’s will can.  A woman’s may.  Yours may, shall.”

His pale, small, delicate face flamed with excitement as he spoke.  Few of his patients looking upon him just then would have known their calm little doctor.  But Cuckoo had cried to him out of the very depths, and out of the very depths he answered her, still prompted—­though now he knew it not—­by that secret voice which sometimes rules a man, at which he wonders ignorantly, the voice of some soul, some great influence, hidden from him in the spaces of the air, the voice of a flame, warm, keen, alive, and power-prompting.

And Cuckoo, as she listened to the doctor, had once again a hint of her own strength, a thrill of hope, a sense that she, even she, was not broken quite in pieces upon the cruel wheel of the world.

“Whatever can I do?” she said; “Valentine’s got him.”

As she spoke, the doctor, restless, as men are in excitement, had moved over to the mantelpiece, and stood with one foot upon the edge of the fender.  Thinking deeply, he glanced over the photographs of Cuckoo’s acquaintance, without actually seeing them.  But presently one, at which he had looked long and fixedly, dawned upon him, cruelly, powerfully.  It was the face of Marr.

“Who is that?” he said abruptly to Cuckoo.

“That?” She too got up and came near to him, lowering her voice almost to a whisper.  “That’s really him.”

“Him?”

“Valentine.”

The doctor looked at her in blank astonishment.

“Yes, it is,” Cuckoo reiterated, and nodding her head with the obstinacy of a child.

“That—­Valentine!  It has no resemblance to him.”

The doctor took up the photograph, and examined it closely.  “This is not Valentine.”

“He told me it was.  It’s Marr—­and somehow it’s him now.”

“Marr,” said the doctor, sharply.  “Why, he is dead.  Julian told me so.  He died—­he died in the Euston Road on the night of Valentine’s trance.  Ah, but you know nothing about that.  Did you know Marr, then?”