His mind, as the time of the darkness grew longer, continued to grow more and more clear, until he felt thoroughly, and was able to try to analyze its unnatural condition.  Scales had fallen from him and from his companions for him.  Their bodies were clothed, their souls, their flames, seemed stripped bare and offered to him naked.  He had examined them with this greedy, yet sane, attention and curiosity.  He had led them into the empty room and stayed with them there.  He had heard the Litany of the Glory of Valentine, and the suffocation, and the anger, and the stirring beneath his yoke of Julian.  He had heard the many women sing in the heart of the lady of the feathers.  But all this seemed leading him forward and onward, step by step, as to a threshold beyond which was some greater, some more importunate, thing.  And he took the last step with Cuckoo.  It was as if he was handed on from one room to another, as is the fashion in the palace of a great king, his name being called in each, and sent before, like a voice sent on the wind, and as if Cuckoo was in the last anteroom that gave upon the audience-chamber.  Now he had arrived, and suddenly a great wave of mysterious expectation ran over him and filled the cup of his soul.  He felt that he stood still and waited.  The sense of Cuckoo, of all she felt and thought in the darkness, gradually dropped away from him, like leaves from a tree, till every branch was leafless.  And this autumnal ravishment, like the ravishment of nature, was but a preparation surely for a future spring.

The doctor waited outside that door, beyond which, perhaps, spring blossomed and sang.  He lost at last all sense of being in a company of people, and felt as one feels who is entirely alone, expectant, calm, ready.  And still only the darkness and the silence.  Nothing more at first.  But presently what seemed to him a marvel.

He had by this time grown at ease with his power of thought-reading, at ease with this new sense of the hearing of silence.  The differing scents of these three flowers hidden in the night had been breathed out to him.  With infallible certainty he had recognized each one, differentiated the one from the other.  And as the scent of one flower had failed, the scent of another had risen upon him, until he had known the heart of each of the three.  Then for a while was the night scentless, silent, blank, empty.  But presently the doctor was aware of an uneasiness and of an anxiety stealing upon him.  Whence it came he could not tell.  Only this he knew, that he received it from something, but that it came neither from the lady of the feathers, from Valentine, nor from Julian.  From whom, then, could it emanate, this weird eagerness, this fluttering, pulsing fear, and hope, and intention?  From himself only?  He asked himself that question.  Was he communing in the dark with his own soul?  He knew that he was not.  The scent of this new and unknown flower grew stronger in the night, more penetrating and intentional.