There is nothing so terrible to one screwed up to the highest pitch of action as a monotony of waiting. Scourging were better, the hemp or the fire. The lady of the feathers had been stirred to a strange enthusiasm, and to a belief in herself, a faith more wonderful to some, more unaccustomed and remote than any faith in God or devil. A flood of energy flowed over her, warm as blood, strong as love, keen with the salt of beautiful novelty, turbulent as the seas when the great tides take hold on them. It was to her as if for the moment the world's centre was just there where she was in the winter, and in the Marylebone Road, within sound of the great church clock, the great church bells, the cries of the street, the very steam panting up from the Baker Street Station. Cuckoo was in the core of things, and the core of things is fierce and hot and action-prompting. That half-revealed shadow waving good-bye to Julian, as he stepped into the frosty night, was a shadow on fire. Yet he had scarcely looked back at it. But Cuckoo was to learn to the last word the lesson of patience. Inspired by the sympathy of the doctor and by something deep in her own heart, she was, for the moment, all courage, all flame. She was ready to fight. She was ready to do supreme things, to touch the stars. The stars went out and she had not touched them. The morning dawned very chilly, very dark, the morning that brought Mrs. Brigg to her room yellow and complaining. Still, Cuckoo was conscious of a high, beating courage that made summer in that winter day. She astonished the old keeper of that weary house by the vivacity of her manner, the brightness of her look. For Mrs. Brigg was well accustomed to sad morning moods, to petulant lassitude, and dull grimness of unpainted and unpowdered fatigue, but had long been a stranger to early moods of hope or of gaiety. Mornings in houses such as hers are recurring tragedies, desolating pulses of Time, shaking human hearts with each beat nearer and nearer to the ultimatum of sorrow. She knew not what to make of this new morning mood of Cuckoo, and wagged a heavily pensive head over it, unresponsive and muttering. Jessie, too, was astonished, but more pleasantly. The little dog, dwelling ignorantly in the midst of degradation, had learned quickly the swing of its beloved mistress's moods. In the dim morning it was ever the comforter of misery it could not rightly understand, not the playfellow of happiness that stirred it to leaps and barks of wonder and excitement. In the mornings Cuckoo held it long against her thin bosom, sometimes crushed it nearly breathless, pushing its little head down in the nest of her arms and telling it a tale of the world's woe that sent long and thin whimpers twittering through its body. The fluttering whisper of morning misery, or the silence of vacant fatigue, these were accustomed things to Jessie. Even if she did not thoroughly understand them, she was ready for them, and