There is a work for you to do, a work which I believe no one else
can do. You love Julian. Love him more. Make him love you. My will cannot
fight the will of Valentine over him. No man's will can. A woman's may.
Yours may, shall."
His pale, small, delicate face flamed with excitement as he spoke. Few
of his patients looking upon him just then would have known their calm
little doctor. But Cuckoo had cried to him out of the very depths, and
out of the very depths he answered her, still prompted--though now he
knew it not--by that secret voice which sometimes rules a man, at which
he wonders ignorantly, the voice of some soul, some great influence,
hidden from him in the spaces of the air, the voice of a flame, warm,
keen, alive, and power-prompting.
And Cuckoo, as she listened to the doctor, had once again a hint of her
own strength, a thrill of hope, a sense that she, even she, was not
broken quite in pieces upon the cruel wheel of the world.
"Whatever can I do?" she said; "Valentine's got him."
As she spoke, the doctor, restless, as men are in excitement, had moved
over to the mantelpiece, and stood with one foot upon the edge of the
fender. Thinking deeply, he glanced over the photographs of Cuckoo's
acquaintance, without actually seeing them.
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