“Then out you go!” said Mrs. Brigg at last.  “Out of my house you pack, you—­” Nameless words followed.

Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards her bedroom stonily to pack her box.  She didn’t care.  She was in a mood to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the one thing Julian had asked of her.  She did not any longer war with words against the purple and hard-breathing landlady.  And her silence and her movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood.  She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom.

“Eh?  What is it?” she ejaculated.  “What are you a-doing of?”

“Going,” Cuckoo threw at her.

“Now?”

“Yes.”

“Where to?”

No answer.  Cuckoo was thrusting the few things still left to her into the only box she now possessed in the world.  Mrs. Brigg stood in the folding doorway watching, and making mouths, as is the fashion of the elderly when emotional.

“What are you going for?” she said presently, as Cuckoo, bending down, stuffed a white petticoat into the depths.

“Can’t pay,” snarled Cuckoo.

“It don’t matter—­for a day or two,” said Mrs. Brigg, reluctantly.

She stumped downstairs, torn by conflicting emotions.  She had got accustomed to Cuckoo, and then both Julian and Valentine, Cuckoo’s visitors, had taught her the colour of the British sovereign.  They had not been near 400 lately, but they might come again.  And then Doctor Levillier.  Cuckoo had some fine friends, who would surely do something for her.  Mrs. Brigg had no other possible lodger in her eye.  On the whole, prudence dictated a day or two’s patience, just a day or two, or a week’s, not more, not a moment more.  Thus it came about that Cuckoo had now been another week beneath the roof of Mrs. Brigg without paying hard cash for the asylum.  The previous evening the landlady had burst out again into fury, refusing to get in any more food for Cuckoo, and demanding the fortnight’s rent.  She had even, carried away by cupidity and passion, striven to drive Cuckoo out to her night’s work.  A physical struggle had taken place between them, ending in the landlady’s hysterics.  Other lodgers had been drawn by the noise from their floors to witness the row.  Two of them had come, on the scene accompanied by men, and to them Mrs. Brigg had shrieked her wrongs and explanations of this swindling virtue of a woman who had formerly paid her way honestly from the street.  The lodgers and their men had provided an accompaniment of jeering laughter to the Brigg solo, and Cuckoo, her clothes nearly torn from her back, had flung at last into her sitting-room and locked the door.  That was last night—­the past which she now reviewed in the morning twilight.  What was she to do?  She was without food.  She was in debt, must leave Mrs. Brigg, no doubt, but must pay