She stumped downstairs, torn by conflicting emotions. She had got accustomed to Cuckoo, and then both Julian and Valentine, Cuckoo's visitors, had taught her the colour of the British sovereign. They had not been near 400 lately, but they might come again. And then Doctor Levillier. Cuckoo had some fine friends, who would surely do something for her. Mrs. Brigg had no other possible lodger in her eye. On the whole, prudence dictated a day or two's patience, just a day or two, or a week's, not more, not a moment more. Thus it came about that Cuckoo had now been another week beneath the roof of Mrs. Brigg without paying hard cash for the asylum. The previous evening the landlady had burst out again into fury, refusing to get in any more food for Cuckoo, and demanding the fortnight's rent. She had even, carried away by cupidity and passion, striven to drive Cuckoo out to her night's work. A physical struggle had taken place between them, ending in the landlady's hysterics. Other lodgers had been drawn by the noise from their floors to witness the row. Two of them had come, on the scene accompanied by men, and to them Mrs. Brigg had shrieked her wrongs and explanations of this swindling virtue of a woman who had formerly paid her way honestly from the street. The lodgers and their men had provided an accompaniment of jeering laughter to the Brigg solo, and Cuckoo, her clothes nearly torn from her back, had flung at last into her sitting-room and locked the door. That was last night--the past which she now reviewed in the morning twilight. What was she to do? She was without food. She was in debt, must leave Mrs. Brigg, no doubt, but must pay her first, had no means to pay for another lodging. She might apply to Doctor Levillier. What held her back from taking that road was mainly this. She had the dumb desire to make a sacrifice for Julian, and the doctor had given her the idea of the only sacrifice she could make--retention of herself from the degradation that kept her free of debt. If she asked the doctor to pay the expenses of the sacrifice, whose would it be? His, not hers. So there was no banker in the world for Cuckoo. The dead-wall faced her. The horizon was shut out. She lay there and tried to think--and tried to think. How to get some money? Something--the devil perhaps--prompted the sleeping Jessie to stir again at the bottom of the bed. Cuckoo felt the little dog's back shift against her stretched-out toes, and suddenly a bitter flood of red ran over her thin, half-starved face, and she hid it in the tumbled pillow, pressing it down. The movement was the attempted physical negation of an abominable, treacherous thought which had just stabbed her mind. How could it have come to her, when she hated it so? She burrowed further into the pillow, at the same time caressing the back of Jessie with little movements of her toes. Horrible, horrible thought! It brought tears which stained the pillow. It brought a hard beating of the heart.