"We will see the old year out and drink our café noir here," said
Valentine. "Where will you sit, Miss Bright?"
"I don't mind. It's all one to me," murmured Cuckoo. "What a funny room, though!" she could not help adding. "It ain't like a room at all."
"Imagine it an Arab tent, the home of a Bedouin Sheik in a desert of Nubia," said Valentine. "This divan is very comfortable. Let me arrange the cushions for you."
As he bent over her to do so, he murmured in her ear:
"And you, having tossed your will away, are nothing!"
They had been the last words of his gospel, proclaimed to her that night on which she prayed!
The lady of the feathers looked up at him with a new knowledge, the knowledge of her recent lonely nights, of which he knew nothing as yet; the knowledge of that glancing spectre of want whom, by her own action, she summoned while she feared its gaunt presence; the knowledge of the doctor's trust in her; the knowledge of her great love for Julian; the knowledge, perhaps, that leaning her arms upon the slippery horse-hair sofa in her little room, she had once thrown a muttered prayer, incoherent, unfinished, yet sincere, out into the great darkness that encompasses the beginning, the progress, and the ending of all human lives with mystery. She looked up at him with this world of mingling knowledge in her eyes, and Valentine drew away from her with a stifling sensation of frigid awe.
"What—what?" he began. Then, recovering himself, he turned suddenly away.
"Sit down, doctor. Do you like my flowers? Julian, are you still tired? The coffee will wake you up. A cigarette, doctor, or a cigar? Here are the matches."
Julian came over heavily and sat down on the divan by Cuckoo. His unnatural lethargy was gradually passing away into a more explicable fatigue, no longer speechless. Leaning on his elbow, he looked into her face with his weary eyes, in which to-night there was a curious dim pathos. It seemed that the only thing which had so far struck him during the evening was still Cuckoo's confusion over her own misunderstanding at dinner, for he now again referred to it.