The masses of tulips hung like quantities of
monotonously similar shadows from the tented ceiling, and the flood of
scent caused the room to seem even smaller than it really was, a tiny
temple dedicated to the uncommon, perhaps to the sinister.
"We will see the old year out and drink our _caf? 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.
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