Then they saw that the lady of the feathers, leaning back in her chair, was fallen asleep, no doubt from sheer weariness. Her face was very white, and in sleep its expression had become ethereal and purified. Her thin hands still rested nervelessly upon the table. She seemed like a little child that had known sorrow early, and sought gently to lose the sense of it in rest. "Cuckoo," Julian said, leaning over her, "Cuckoo!" She stirred and woke. "I'm awfully done," she murmured, in her street voice. "Pardon!" She sat up. "I seemed as if I was put to sleep," she said. "You were," Valentine answered her. "I willed that you should sleep." He looked at the doctor, and his eyes said: "I have had my triumph. You witness it." Cuckoo reddened with anger, but she said nothing. "Did you feel anything, Julian?" Valentine asked. Julian looked strangely hopeless. "Nothing," he said. "It's all different from what it was; like a dead thing that used to be alive." It seemed as if the sitting had filled him with a dogged despair. "A dead thing," he repeated. Then he went over to the spirit-stand and poured himself out more absinthe. "And you, doctor?" said Valentine. "What did you feel?" "I was thinking all the time," he said, "of other things. Not of the table or of table-turning." When he and Cuckoo left the flat that night, or rather in the chill first morning of the new year, they left Julian with Valentine. He said he would stay, speaking in the voice of a man drugged almost into uncertainty of his surroundings. CHAPTER V THE LADY OF THE FEATHERS STARVES