He put his arm round her shoulder. She glanced up at him. Then, with the odd penetration that so often gilds female ignorance till it dazzles and distracts, she said quickly: "You don't mean what you say; you don't really care." Julian was taken aback by her sharpness, and by the self-revelation that immediately stabbed him. "You mustn't say that," he began. But she stopped him on the instant. "You don't care; you think it's nothing. So it ought to be to me, I know." That had perhaps actually been his thought, the thought of a mind unimaginative to-day, because deadened by the excitement of action. But if it was his thought he hastened to deny it. "You know I don't think of you in that way," he said. "You will now. You do." That was the scourge that had lashed her all through this weary day of miserable reaction; that now stung her to a passion that was like the passion of purity. As she made this statement there was a question in her eyes, but it was a question of despair, that scarcely even asked for the negative which Julian hastened to give. He was both perplexed and troubled by the unexpected violence of her emotion, and blamed himself as the cause. But, though he blamed himself, his regret for what was irrevocable had none of the poignancy of Cuckoo's. For a long time he had gloried in living in a cloister with Valentine. Now he had left the cloister, he did not look back to it with the curious pathos which so often gathers like moss upon even a dull and vacant past. He did not, for the moment, look back at all. Action had lifted scales from his eyes, had stirred the youth in him, had stung him as if with bright fire, and given him, at a breath, a thousand thoughts, visions, curiosities. A sense of power came to him. He did not ask whether the power made for evil or for good. Simply, he was inclined to glory in it, as a man glories in his recovered strength when he wakes from a long sleep following fatigue. Cuckoo, with feeble hands, seemed tugging to hold back this power, with feeble voice seemed crying against it as a deadly thing. And Julian, though he strove to console her, scarcely sympathized with her fully. He could not, if he would, be quite unhappy to-day. Only in Cuckoo's grief he began to read a curious legend. In her tears there was a passion, in her anger a vehemence that could only spring from the depths of a nature. Julian began to suspect that through all her sins and degradations this girl, his lady of the feathers, had managed to keep shut one door, though all the others had been ruthlessly opened. And beyond this door was surely that holy of holies, an unspoiled woman's heart. From what other dwelling could rush forth such a passion for a man's respect, such a fury to be rightly and chivalrously considered? As he half vaguely realized something of the true position of Cuckoo and of himself, Julian felt stirred by the wonder of life, in which such strange blossoms flower out of the very dust.