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"Why, somethin' Julian said once. He thinks a lot of you. I was afraid to come, but I I thought I would. It's seein' them at least Julian since they got back made me come." "I haven't seen them yet," the doctor said, and there was an interrogation in the accent with which he spoke. Something in Cuckoo's intense manner roused both wonder and alarm in him.
Thrushes and blackbirds piped with cheerful persistence among the greening boughs of the old chestnut which shaded Mary Deane's cottage, and children roaming over the grassy downs above the sea, brought news of the skylark's song and the cuckoo's call.
He kept them to the mill, nor gave them longer rest than the cuckoo's note lasted, or they could sing a song. But that quern was such that it ground anything that the grinder chose, though until then it had ground nothing but gold and peace.
One bit, hard and many cornered as it seemed, somehow gained entrance to the bed, and greeted Cuckoo's every movement with uncompromising grittiness. No shaking of coverlet and sheet, no beating of pillow, no kicks and scufflings could expel it. The bed seemed full of hard bits of toast, and Cuckoo felt as if an additional burden were laid upon her by this slight evil.
She had got accustomed to Cuckoo, and then both Julian and Valentine, Cuckoo's visitors, had taught her the colour of the British sovereign. They had not been near 400 lately, but they might come again. And then Doctor Levillier. Cuckoo had some fine friends, who would surely do something for her. Mrs. Brigg had no other possible lodger in her eye.
"I don't feel the least inclined to play at anything, and I shouldn't care to go to the mandarins again. Oh, cuckoo, cuckoo, I am so dull; couldn't you think of anything to amuse me?" It was not near "any o'clock." But after waiting a minute or two, it seemed to Griselda that she heard the soft sound of "coming" that always preceded the cuckoo's appearance. She was right.
All this he had done with calm deliberation, the very cheerful composure which he always practiced towards the victims of nervous complaints. But even while he did this his own mind was in a turmoil. For this woman had let fall statements with regard to her dead husband which most curiously bolstered up Cuckoo's fantastic assertion that Valentine and Marr were the same man.
Your song is a better answer to a man's self-questionings than he can ever get from a cuckoo." "I doubt that," said the minstrel. "Song, at the best, is but the echo of some voice from the heart of Nature. And if the cuckoo's note seemed to you such a voice, it was an answer to your questionings perhaps more simply truthful than man can utter, if you had rightly construed the language."
Cuckoo's suddenly altered mode of life had tried her greatly. The girl had taken to going out in the day and staying at home at night. Simultaneously with this changed régime her funds had evidently become low. She had begun to live less well, to watch more keenly than of old the condition in which her commons went down to the kitchen and returned from it on the advent of the next meal.
Her old mother, who believed her dead, had often cried and said to the neighbours that her beauty had been Cuckoo's undoing. Thus do we lay blame on the few fine gifts that should gild our lives. But Cuckoo had been very pretty and had soon learnt the first foul lesson of her métier, to wake swift desire.
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