He divined, as in a vision, or as in a dream that is more real than reality, the story of his friend, the true Valentine, whom he had loved.  He remembered Valentine’s dissatisfaction with the glory of his own beautiful nature, his mad desire to change it.  That dissatisfaction, that desire, had been the opportunity of the enemy.  The soul that sighed in sorrow as it contemplated its own loveliness had been expelled by the soul that was completely satisfied with its own hatefulness.  The weakness of the flame of purity had built up the strength of the flame of impurity.  And so beauty was driven out to wander in the wilderness of the air, and ugliness dwelled in its body, its temple swept and garnished, like the seven devils of the Scripture.  For how long a time had the wandering flame or soul of beauty been helpless, impotent, tortured by the appalling deception of the soul of Julian, whom it could no longer protect!  Unable to be at rest, it had stayed to contemplate the dreary legend of Julian’s gradual fall.  It had seen his confidence in his love for the stranger whom he thought his friend and his protector.  In the pale and delicate dawn, shrouded in the mystery of night and day, enclosed between the clasping hands of the angels of darkness and of light, it had hung in the air above the solitary Julian, as he walked homeward after his vigil by the lifeless body of Valentine.  With a passionate effort it had sought to draw him to a knowledge of the truth, that he might wake from the dream in which lay his insecurity, at last his tragic danger.  And faintly, even as the first sunbeam it had dawned upon him, once as he met the lady of the feathers, again as he bent his gaze upon the theatrical glories that attended the apotheosis of Margaret.  And it had flickered behind the film of the tears in a woman’s eyes, seeking to make itself known through the beauty of the love that clung inexorably to the heart of Cuckoo in the midst of the degradation and the corruption of her fate.  Cuckoo had given it a home.  She was alone.  It approached her.  She was an outcast.  It stayed with her.  She was beaten by the thongs of a world that teems with Pharisees.  It clung to her.  She had, through all her days and nights, been put only to the black uses of evil.  It sought to use her only for good.  And now at last it drew strength and power from the soul of the lady of the feathers.  And the doctor knew that the secret of Cuckoo’s grand influence to succour lay in her completeness.  Degraded, wretched, soiled, ignorant, pent within the prison-house of lust—­yet she loved completely.  And because she loved completely, the sad, wandering, driven soul of Valentine chose her from all the world to help him in the rescue of Julian.  For she, like the widow, had given her all to feed the poor.  Her starvation had set her on high, more than the starvation and the mortification of saints and hermits.  For they crucify the flesh for the good of their own souls.  Cuckoo thought ever and only of another.  She had betrayed Jessie and touched the stars.  Now in her slumber, physical allegory of her abnegation of self, she fought in this battle of the souls.