"That one night is nothing," he said. "Or rather it is something that you must redeem. It is good to have to pay for a thing. It is that makes one work. There is a work for you to do, a work which I believe no one else can do. You love Julian. Love him more. Make him love you. My will cannot fight the will of Valentine over him. No man's will can. A woman's may. Yours may, shall." His pale, small, delicate face flamed with excitement as he spoke. Few of his patients looking upon him just then would have known their calm little doctor. But Cuckoo had cried to him out of the very depths, and out of the very depths he answered her, still prompted--though now he knew it not--by that secret voice which sometimes rules a man, at which he wonders ignorantly, the voice of some soul, some great influence, hidden from him in the spaces of the air, the voice of a flame, warm, keen, alive, and power-prompting. And Cuckoo, as she listened to the doctor, had once again a hint of her own strength, a thrill of hope, a sense that she, even she, was not broken quite in pieces upon the cruel wheel of the world. "Whatever can I do?" she said; "Valentine's got him." As she spoke, the doctor, restless, as men are in excitement, had moved over to the mantelpiece, and stood with one foot upon the edge of the fender. Thinking deeply, he glanced over the photographs of Cuckoo's acquaintance, without actually seeing them. But presently one, at which he had looked long and fixedly, dawned upon him, cruelly, powerfully. It was the face of Marr. "Who is that?" he said abruptly to Cuckoo. "That?" She too got up and came near to him, lowering her voice almost to a whisper. "That's really _him_." "Him?" "Valentine." The doctor looked at her in blank astonishment. "Yes, it is," Cuckoo reiterated, and nodding her head with the obstinacy of a child. "That--Valentine! It has no resemblance to him." The doctor took up the photograph, and examined it closely. "This is not Valentine." "He told me it was. It's Marr--and somehow it's him now." "Marr," said the doctor, sharply. "Why, he is dead. Julian told me so. He died--he died in the Euston Road on the night of Valentine's trance. Ah, but you know nothing about that. Did you know Marr, then?" "Yes, I knew him." Cuckoo hesitated. But something taught her to be perfectly frank with the doctor. So she added: "I'd been with him at that hotel the night he died." "You were the woman! But, then, how can you say that this (he touched the photograph with his finger) is Valentine?" "He says he's really Marr." Cuckoo spoke in the most mulish manner, following her habit when she was completely puzzled, but sticking to what she believed to be the truth. "Marr and Valentine one man! He told you that?" "He says to me--'I'm Marr.'"