Julian reddened with a sudden understanding. Her words touched him in his sorest place. In the first place, no man likes to think he has been doing a thing because he has been led by some one else. In the second, Julian had grown ardently to dislike Cuckoo's unreasoning antipathy to Valentine. Originally, and for some time, he had believed that she would get over it. Finding later that there was no chance of that, he had once told her that he could not hear Valentine abused. Since that day she had been careful not to mention his name. But now her bitterness against him peeped out once more, and seemed even to have been gathering force during the interval. "Cuckoo, you're talking great nonsense," he said, forcing himself to speak quietly. But she was in one of her most mulish moods, and was not to be turned from the subject or silenced. "No, I ain't," she said. "Where was you last week? You didn't come in once." "I was in Paris." Cuckoo's brow clouded still more. Her knowledge of Paris was not intimate, and, indeed, was confined to stories dropped from the lips of men who had been there for short periods, and for purposes the reverse of geographical or artistic. Julian's mention of the French capital drove a sword into her. "With him?" she exclaimed. "Yes, with Valentine." "Oh, what did you do there?" She spoke with angry insistence, and Julian could not help thinking of Valentine's remark, "That girl loves you." It seemed indeed that Cuckoo must have some deep and wholly personal reason prompting her to this strange demonstration of vexation. "I can't tell you everything," Julian answered. "Oh, you can't kid me over that. I know well enough what men go to Paris for!" she rejoined, with almost hysterical bitterness.