everything she could pawn, and sold every trifle that was saleable. Even Jessie's broad band of yellow satin had been included in a heterogeneous parcel of odds and ends purchased by a phlegmatic German with eyes like marbles and the manner of a stone image. Living less and less well, doing without fires, sitting often in the dark at night to save the expense of gas, Cuckoo had managed to pay her rent until a week ago. Then money had failed, and the great earthquake had at length tossed and swallowed the wretched Mrs. Brigg. The scene had been tropical. Mrs. Brigg was really moved to the very depths of her being. For days she had been, as it were, eating and drinking apprehension. Now apprehension choked her. She was shot up in the air by the cannon of climax. Limbs and mind were in the extreme of commotion. From her point of view it must be acknowledged that the situation was unduly exasperating. For Cuckoo would give no reason whatever for her reiterated formula of refusal to earn any money. And now she could not pay her week's rent, plunging Mrs. Brigg into the further circle of an _inferno_, and yet sat within doors day after day. Mrs. Brigg approached apoplexy by way of persuasion, was by turns pathetic and paralytic with passion. She coaxed with the ardour of an executioner inveigling the victim's neck to the noose and in haste to be off to breakfast. She threatened like Jove in curl-papers. Cuckoo was inexorable. "Then out you go!" said Mrs. Brigg at last. "Out of my house you pack, you--" Nameless words followed. Cuckoo got up from her chair with no show of emotion and moved towards her bedroom stonily to pack her box. She didn't care. She was in a mood to lie down in the gutter and wait the last blow of Fate, living only in her one obstinate determination to do what the doctor had told her, the one thing Julian had asked of her. She did not any longer war with words against the purple and hard-breathing landlady. And her silence and her movement of obedience awed Mrs. Brigg for the moment into another mood. She shuffled after Cuckoo into the bedroom. "Eh? What is it?" she ejaculated. "What are you a-doing of?" "Going," Cuckoo threw at her. "Now?" "Yes." "Where to?" No answer. Cuckoo was thrusting the few things still left to her into the only box she now possessed in the world. Mrs. Brigg stood in the folding doorway watching, and making mouths, as is the fashion of the elderly when emotional. "What are you going for?" she said presently, as Cuckoo, bending down, stuffed a white petticoat into the depths. "Can't pay," snarled Cuckoo. "It don't matter--for a day or two," said Mrs. Brigg, reluctantly.