Yet was it vaguer, more distant, than that emitted by those other three flowers.  The exact impression received by the doctor at this moment was very subtle.  Precisely it was this:  It seemed to him that he was gradually coming into communication with a fourth mind, or soul; that this soul was actually more strong, more vehement, even more determined, than the souls of his three companions, but that some barrier removed it from him, set it very far of.  The flame of a match held to a man’s eyes may dazzle him more than the flame of a great fire on the horizon.  This new flame was as the latter in comparison to match-flames that had been flaring in the doctor’s eyes.  And this great and distant flame burned slowly in a smoke of mystery and upon the verge of dense darkness.

Never had the doctor known so peculiar, and even awe-striking, an experience as that which he now underwent.  What utterly bewildered him was the circumstance of this undoubted new and definite personality enclosed in this tiny room with him and with his three companions.  He was receiving the impression of the thoughts of a stranger.  Yet there was no stranger in the chamber.  And he was vexed and curiously irritated by the fact of the impression being at the same time very vague and very violent, like the cry of a man which reaches you faintly from a very long distance, but which you feel instinctively to have been uttered with the frantic force of death or of despair.  And the mind of this stranger was tugging at the doctor’s mind, anxiously, insistently.  There was a depth of distress in it that was as no mere human distress, and that moved the doctor to a mood beyond the mood of tears or of prayers.  There came over him an awful sense of pity for this stranger-soul.  What had it done?  How was it circumstanced?  In what ghastly train of events did it move?  It was surely powerful and helpless at the same time; a cripple with a mind on fire with fight; Samson blind.  He felt that it wanted something—­of him, or of his companions, some light in its severe desolation.  Deeper and deeper grew his horror and pity for it, deeper and deeper his sense of its ill fate.  The woe of it was unearthly, yet more than earthly woe.  Similes came to the doctor to compare with its dreadful circumstance:  a child motherless in a world all winter; a saint devoted to hell by some great error of God; even one more blasphemous, and more bizarre still—­God worsted by humanity, and, at the last, helpless to reclaim the souls to which He had Himself given being; lonely God in a lonely heaven, seeing far-off hell bursting with the countless multitudes of the writhing lost.  This last simile stayed with him.  He fancied, he felt—­not heard—­the voice of this frustrate God calling to him:  “Do what I could not do.  Strive to help My impotence.  A little—­a little—­and even yet hell would stand empty, the vacant courts of heaven be filled.  Act—­act—­act.”

“Doctor, why are you trembling?  Why are you trembling?”