Almost for the first time in her life the lady of the feathers definitely longed for a legitimate occupation. How she could have flown at it to-day. But already the bright mood was fading. It could not last in such an atmosphere. As Cuckoo had said, she could fight better than she could pray. But it seemed to her, after a while, that there was only room in this cheerless, dark house to pray, no room at all to fight. She tried reading yesterday's evening paper, left on the horsehair sofa by Julian. But reading had never been a favourite occupation of hers, and to-day she wanted to save Julian, to make him love her, and so to win him from Valentine. She did not want to sit in the twilight of a winter's day reading about people she had never seen, things she did not understand. And she threw the paper down. To make Julian love her. Cuckoo flushed, yes, even sitting there quite alone, for Jessie had retired to the warmth of the bedroom blankets, as she said it in her mind. The doctor had told her to do so. Her heart had told her to try to do it long ago. But she trusted the doctor and she did not trust her heart. And how could she trust her power to make Julian love her? Cuckoo had once known very well how to make a man desire her. In the very early days of her career she had been a very pretty girl. Her old mother, who believed her dead, had often cried and said to the neighbours that her beauty had been Cuckoo's undoing. Thus do we lay blame on the few fine gifts that should gild our lives. But Cuckoo had been very pretty and had soon learnt the first foul lesson of her _métier_, to wake swift desire. As time went on and she wasted her gift of beauty along the pavements of London, she found this poor power failing in strength and in certainty. As to the power of wakening that slower, deeper, kindred, yet opposed desire of love, Cuckoo had never known whether she possessed it. She had had many lovers, but nobody to love her really, and this in days of her beauty, or at any rate her gracious prettiness. No wonder, then, that now a chill ran over her at the thought of the task that lay before her if she was to gain her battle. To break Valentine's influence she had to make Julian love her. How? Instinctively, and with a sense of horror, she knew that her usual practised arts, instead of helping, almost fatally handicapped her now. She loved Julian purely, so purely that she could not endure that he should meet her degradation as he had met it on that one night she never thought of but with repentance. Yet to her ignorance, to her, rising towards purity now, yet ever steeped in the coarsest knowledge, it seemed that the thing called love could hardly utter itself save by some threadbare blandishment, or parrot combination of words, used each night by a hundred women of the town. Cuckoo knew no language of love that was not, so to say, bad language, inasmuch as it was used by those whom she hated.