Cuckoo let them go by. She had been stung
too often, and repetition of cruelty sometimes kills what it repeats. She
set her lips to silence, with a look of obstinacy not impressive, but
merely mulish and childish.
"Well?" Valentine said.
She made no answer. He did not seem angry, but continued:
"You find few fish for your net there, I imagine. But perhaps you don't
go for fish. What was the name you read upon the door while I watched
you?"
This time Cuckoo, changing her mind, as she often did, with all the
swiftness of a crude nature, answered him:
"You know well enough!"
"It was Dr. Levillier, wasn't it?"
She nodded her head silently.
"Why do you go to his door? What do you want with him?"
Cuckoo's quick woman's instinct detected a suspicion of something that
was like anxiety in his voice as he said the words. In an instant the
warm impulse that, in her silent meditation, had led her to buckle on her
armour and to think, with a certain courage, that she was to fight one
day, stirred and glowed and leaped up, an impulse greater than herself.
The fear that had fallen upon her was lessened, for she felt that this
man, too, might, nay did, know fear.
"What's that to you?"
She turned upon him boldly with the question, and he knew her for
the first time as an antagonist, who might actively attack as well as
passively hate.
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