On the night when Valentine heard Julian babble incoherently the name of the lady of the feathers, he said to himself that the battle should be his, and he leaned upon his will to feel its power and its glory. That night he forgot its fury, the intense emotion that had overtaken him at the supper-table as he gauged, or strove to gauge, the influence that Cuckoo was obtaining over Julian. He forgot Doctor Levillier. He remembered only himself and his own strength, which he was now to test to its foundations. And when he woke again to thoughts of others, it was only to laugh at the force arrayed against him. The lady of the feathers moved, to his fancy, like the most piteous of puppets, a jeering fate manipulating the strings. This manipulator had kept her long to one set of motions, stiff pleading arm, anxious head, interrogative joints, and a strut of wolfish eagerness and hunger. But such a game was now to be abandoned. And behold the puppet a warrior forsooth, a very Amazon, hounded to fight by the doctor's voice, the doctor's word of encouragement, battling with the stiff arms that had abandoned the pleading gesture, stern in a wooden attitude of defiance. And Fate, in fits of laughter at the string-holding! Then Valentine lost his fear, and could have been angry that such a scarecrow was the creature selected by Fate to draw a sword against him. He chose to forget the vision in the mirror when he struck at the staring reflection of the lady of the feathers and shivered under the influence of a cold terror. He chose to remember only the thin and fearful woman who had given her body to the world, and so had surely given her soul to a mill that had long ago ground it to powder.