He looked at Cuckoo with new eyes. She looked back at him with the old ones of a girl who loves. As he looked she stopped crying. Perhaps the sudden understanding in his gaze thrilled her. He put out his hand to touch hers, and again repeated his negative, but this time with greater conviction. "I do not think of you in that way. I never shall," he said. Her face was still full of doubt, and thin with anxiety. She was not reassured, that seemed apparent; for in her ignorance she had a strange knowledge of life, and especially a strange intuition which guided her instincts as to the instinctive proceedings of men. "They always do," she murmured. "Why should you be different?" "All men aren't alike," he said, pretending to laugh at her. "Yes, in some things, though," she contradicted. "They all think dirt of you for doing what they want." Seeing how unsatisfied she was, and how restlessly her anxiety paced up and down, Julian resolved on more plain-speaking. "Look here, Cuckoo," he said, and his voice had never sounded more boyish, "last night I was drunk. Last night I woke up, and I'd been asleep for years." "Eh?" she interrupted, looking puzzled, but he went on: "I was emancipated, and I was mad. Mind, I didn't mean to do you any wrong, but if you have thought of me in a different way, I'm sorry. Tell me what you want me to be to you, and in future I'll be it." Hope and eagerness sprang up in her eyes then. "I say," she began, "Yes." "You promise?" "I promise." The dull blood rose in her tired face. "I want just a--just a friend," she said, as if almost ashamed. Julian smiled. "Not a lover," he said, with a fleeting air of gallantry. She shrank visibly from the word, and hurriedly went on: "Not I. I've had too much of love." The last word was spoken with a violence of contempt. "I want a man as likes me, just really likes me, as he might another man. See?" "And you'll not love him?" His eyes searched hers with a gaiety of inquiry that was almost laughter. Cuckoo looked away. "I'll not love him either," she said steadily. "I'll just like him too." Seeing her earnestness and obvious emotion, Julian dropped his gently quizzing manner, and became earnest, too, in his degree. "Then it's a bargain," he said. "You and I are to like each other thoroughly, never anything more, never anything less. Like two men, eh?" She began at last to look relieved and happier. "Yes, like that," she said. "Ain't it--ain't it truer than the other thing? There's something beastly about love; that's what I always think." And she spoke with the sincerest conviction. When Julian left her that day, he shook hands with her by the door; she stood after he had done it as if still half expectant. "There's a man's good-bye to a man," he said. "Better sort of thing than a man's good-bye to a woman, isn't it?"