“No, there you are right,” he answered with emphasis.  “Sane men do not, can never, I believe, change so utterly.”

“That’s what I say.  I’ve seen men go down, lots of ’em, but it ain’t like that.”

Cuckoo spoke with some authority, as of one speaking from depths of a deep experience.  She put her hands under the warm rug with a sensation of something that was like dignity of mind.  She and the doctor were talking on equal terms of intellectuality just at this moment.  She was saying sensible things and he was obliged to agree with her.

“Not like that,” she murmured again out of the embrace of the rug.

He turned towards her so that he could see her more distinctly and make his words more impressive.

“Remember now that what I am going to say to you must not be mentioned to Julian on any account, or to any one,” he said.

“I’ll remember.  Honour.  I’ll never tell.”

“I have a very sad theory to explain this great change in Mr. Cresswell, from what he was as I knew him, and you must take his beauty of character from me—­to what he is as you and I know him now.  I believe that he has become mad.”  For the doctor had resolutely put away from his mind the fancies called up in it by the visit of Marr’s wife.

Cuckoo gave a little cry of surprise, then hastily glanced at the coachman’s back and pushed her hands under the rug up towards her mouth.

“Hush,” said the doctor.  “Only listen quietly.”

“Yes, pardon,” she said.  “But he ain’t—­oh, he can’t be.”

“I am forced to think it, forced to think it,” the doctor said, with pressure.  “He has, in great measure, one of the most common, most universal, of the fatuous beliefs of the insane,—­a deep-rooted, an almost incredible belief in himself, in his own glory, power, will, personality.”

Cuckoo tried to throw in some remark here, but he went on without a pause: 

“There are madmen confined in asylums all over England who think themselves the Messiah—­this is the commonest form of religious mania—­emperors, kings, regenerators of the human race, doers of great deeds that must bring them everlasting fame.  On all other points they are sane, and you might spend hours alone with them and never discover the one crank in their mind that makes the whole mind out of joint.  So you have been alone with Mr. Cresswell and have not suspected him.  Yet he has a madness, and it is this madness which leads him to this frightful conduct of his towards Julian, conduct which you will never know the extent of.”

Here Cuckoo succeeded in getting in a remark: 

“Will,” she said, catching hold of that one word and beginning to look eager.  “That’s what he was at all the time he was talking to me that night.  Will, he says, is this and that and the other; will, he says, is everythin’, I remember.  Will, he says, is my God, or somethin’ like it.  He did.  He did.”