What had Valentine said? What--what? She
stared dully at the doctor under her corrugated brows.
"What did he say?" she murmured in an inward voice, "Well--he didn't want
me to see you. He came here about that--my seeing you."
"Yes."
"And--and Marr's not dead, he says, at least not done with. Yes, that was
it--he says as no strong man who's lived long's done with when he's put
away. See?"
Her face lighted up a little. She was beginning to trust her memory.
"The influence of men lives after them," the doctor said. "Marr's too.
Yes. He said that?"
She nodded. Then with a flash of understanding, a flash of that
smouldering power which she had felt in loneliness and longed to tear
out from its prison, she cried:
"That's it. That's how he's Marr, then."
She hesitated.
"Isn't it?" she said, flushing with the thought that she might be showing
herself a fool. For she scarcely understood what she really meant.
"Valentine, no longer himself, but endowed with the influence of Marr,"
the doctor muttered; "she means that he told her something like that.
The phantasy of an unsteady brain."--"Go on," he added to her.
But Cuckoo was relapsing into confusion already.
"And then he talked a lot about will, as he called it.
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