he could look at the stars with greater ease.  Indeed, as he walked, he did look at them, and thought of the eyes of Cuckoo, and then of the eyes of all women, and of their strange intensities of suggestion and of realization, of their language of the devil and of the clouds, of their kindling vigours.  But the eyes of Cuckoo were no longer as the eyes of any other woman.  Julian glanced at a girl who watched him from the corner of the street.  He knew that Cuckoo looked each night at men as that girl looked at him.  He knew it, yet he felt that he did not believe it.  For to him she was dressed already in the fillet of some priestess, in the robes of one tending some strange and unnamed altar.  She woke in him a little of the uneasy fear and uneasy attraction that a creature whom a man feels to be greater than himself often wakes in him.  That evening, while Julian sat with her, he had been seized with curious conflicting desires to fall before her or to strike her, to draw her close or to fend her off from him, all dull, too, and vague as in heaviness of dreaming.  Those feelings, vague in the house, were scarcely clearer in the cold and in the open spaces of the night, and Julian was conscious of a sense of irritation, of anger against himself.  He felt as if he were an oaf, a lout.  Was it, could it be, Cuckoo who had made him feel so?  After all, what was she?  Julian tried to hug and soothe himself in the unworthy remembrance of Cuckoo’s monotonous life and piteous deeds, to reinstate himself in contented animalism by thoughts of the animalism of this priestess!  He laughed aloud under the stars, but the laugh rang hollow.  He could not reinstate himself.  He could only wearily repeat, “What the devil’s come over Cuckoo?” with an iteration of dull, moody petulance.

A hansom suddenly pulled up beside him and a voice called: 

“Julian!  Julian, where are you coming from?”

It was Valentine.  He was muffled in a fur coat, and stretched himself over the wooden apron to attract his friend’s attention.

“I have been to your rooms,” he continued.  “Don’t you remember we had arranged to dine together?”

Julian looked at him without animation.

“I had forgotten it,” he answered.

“Your memory is becoming very treacherous,” Valentine said.  “Where are you off to?  Get in.  I will drive you.”

“I hadn’t any plan,” Julian said, getting into the cab.

“Drive to the Savoy,” Valentine called to the cabman.  “I want some supper,” he added.

“I can’t come in.  I’m not dressed.”

“We will have a private room, then.  Have you dined?”

“I?  No.”

Valentine looked at him narrowly.

“Have you been in the Marylebone Road again?” he asked.

“Yes.”

“Why?”

“I don’t know.”

The answer was the bald truth.  In making it Julian experienced a slight feeling of relief.  He was putting into words the vagueness that perplexed him.  He wondered why he did go to see Cuckoo.