"I see," Cuckoo said, a burning excitement beginning to wake in her.
"Justified in fighting him, but not in hating him."
"Oh," she said, with a much more doubtful accent.
"Scarcely any human being, if indeed any, is completely hateful. How then can a human being, whose mind is ill and out of control, be hateful?" said the doctor, gently.
She felt herself rebuked, and a quick thought of herself, of what she was, rebuked her too.
"I'll try not," she murmured, but with no inward conviction of success.
They were on the heath now, and the smoke of London hung in the wintry air beyond and below them. The sun was already beginning to wear the aspect of a traveller on the point of departure for a journey. His once golden face was sinister with that blood-red hue which it so often assumes on winter afternoons, and which seems to set it in a place more than usually remote, more than usually distant from our world, and in a clime that is sad and strange. Winds danced over the heath like young witches. The horses, whipped by the more intense cold, pulled hard against the bit, and made the coachman's arms ache. The doctor looked away for a moment at the vapours that began to clothe the afternoon in the hollows and depressions of the landscape, and at the sun, whose gathering change of aspect smote on his imagination as something akin to the change that falls over the faces of men towards that hour when the sun of their glory makes ready for its setting. Still keeping his glance on that sad red sun in its nest of radiating vapours, he said, in a withdrawn voice:
"We must hate nothing except the hatefulness of sin in ourselves and in others."
Cuckoo listened as to the voice of some one on a throne, and tears that she could not fully understand rose in her eyes.
But now the doctor turned from the sun to the lady of the feathers, and there was a bright light in his quiet eyes.