Julian did not come again to the house in the Marylebone Road for at least a fortnight, and during that time the lady of the feathers was left alone with her life and with her sad thoughts. The summer days went heavily by, and the sultry summer nights. No rain fell, and London was veiled in dust. The pavements were so hot that they burned the feet that trod them. Sometimes they seemed to burn Cuckoo's very soul, and to sear her heart as she stood upon them for hours in the night, while the crowds of Piccadilly flitted by like shadows in an evil dream. She stared mechanically at the faces of those passing as she strolled with a lagging footstep along the line of houses. She turned to meet the eyes of the pale-faced loungers in the lighted entrance of the St. James's restaurant, "Jimmy's," as she called it. But her mind was preoccupied. A problem had fastened upon it with the tenacity of some vampire or strange clinging creature of night. Cuckoo was wrestling with an angel; or was it a devil? And often, when she stopped on the pavement and exchanged a word or two with some casual stranger, she scarcely knew what she said, or to what kind of man she was speaking. She was possessed by one thought, the thought of Julian and of his danger. Valentine, in her thoughts, was strangely a pale shadow, incredibly evil, incredibly persistent, luring Julian downwards, beckoning him with the thin hand of a saint to depths unpierced by the gaze of even the most sinful. And that hand of the saint was only part of the appalling deception of his beautiful and tragically lying body, a crystal temple in which a demon dwelt secretly, peering from its concealment through the shadowy blue windows, in which Julian saw truth and honour, but in which Cuckoo read things to terrify and to dismay. For she was not wholly unaware of the mystery of Valentine, of the sharp contrast between his appearance and the vision of his nature as it came to her. She understood that there was something in the fine beauty of his face and figure to account for Julian's blindness and refusal to be warned against him. Cuckoo's intuition, the intuition of an unlearned and instinctive creature trained by the hardest circumstances to rely on what she called her wits, laid the crystal temple in ruins, and drove the demon from its lurking-place naked and shrieking into the open. But, after all, was not she rather deceived than Julian? Julian, from the first moment of meeting Valentine, looked upon him as saint. Cuckoo, from the first moment of meeting, looked upon him as devil. Each put him aside from the general run of humanity, the one in a heaven of the imagination, the other in a hell. Neither would allow him to be midway between the two, containing possibilities of both,--ordinary, natural man. Julian angrily scouted the notion of Valentine's being like other men. Cuckoo felt instinctively that he was not. And so they glorified and cursed him.