and the woman who could lie down in the mud and let the world see her there, and the woman who had sold her soul for food, and a thin woman, such a thin, almost transparent, wistful creature, who was facing the thing men call with bated breath--starvation. She sang too, but, of all these women, she was the only one the doctor could not rightly hear nor rightly see. For she, as yet, was remote, far down the level line of that choir, hardly perhaps one with it yet, faint of voice, dim of outline. The doctor heard the choir sing, and then-- 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.