set his own mind free from clouds of excitement and from mists of unreason.  That was the first step.  But it did more.  It developed in him this marvellous faculty of the hearing of silence, called by some divination.  All his senses were rendered amazingly acute.  A perfectly distinct impression of the precise feelings of Cuckoo, of Valentine, and of Julian respectively came to him as he sat there, although he could neither see nor hear them.  Each of them seemed to pour his or her thoughts into the doctor’s mind.  Thus, at first, did his empty room become furnished with the thoughts of his companions.  He was sitting in the circle between Julian and Valentine and held their hands.  And it was Valentine who forged the first link in this strange chain of unuttered communication.  As the darkness cleared the doctor’s mind, and set him once more on his feet—­although in a new world—­an aroma of triumph floated to him softly, like a scent in a damp wood at night.  He heard then the mind of Valentine murmuring in the stillness the Litany of its glory, a long and an ornate Litany, deep and full, and he knew that he had been right in supposing that Valentine had invited him to witness that glory.  But the doctor became aware, too, that at moments the Litany faltered, hesitated, as if the mind of Valentine grew uncertain or was assailed by vague fears.  And these fears ran like little pale furtive things to Valentine from the lady of the feathers.  By degrees the doctor could imagine that he actually saw them stealing back and forth.  Now one would come alone as if to listen to the Litany, and then another would follow, and another, and, growing brave, they would combine against it.  Then Valentine would waver and become uneasy, as one who hears little voices crying against him in the night, and knows not whence they come or from whom.  But the Litany would begin again, and Valentine would triumph over the pale fears and they would shrink away.  And in the Litany one name recurred again and again—­the name of Julian.  Over him was the triumph.  In his ruin and fall and ultimate destruction the glory lived.  To witness the complete possibility of this ruin, the complete sovereignty of this glory, the doctor and the lady of the feathers were there.  And the doctor grew to feel that only some outside circumstance, alarming Valentine to anxiety and waking Julian to a new observation, had hindered the intended triumph.  What circumstance was that?  He looked back along the past evening and found it in himself, in his theory that a soul expelled was not necessarily a soul dead.  The rift in the glory of the Litany came with that.  Valentine was trying to close it by this act of sitting, to impress the strength of his will upon his companions in the darkness.  The doctor felt his effort like a continually repeated blow, stealthy and hard and merciless.