They turned and faced one another, breathless a little.  Tenderness and terror shone plainly in their eyes, but Spinrobin, ever an ineffectual little man, and with nothing of the “Master” really in his composition anywhere, found no word to speak.  That sudden irruption of the terrific clergyman into their intimate world had come with an effect of dramatic and incalculable authority.  Like a blast of air that drives the furnace to new heat and turns the metal white, his mind now suddenly saw clear and sure.  The effect of the incident was too explosive, however, for him to find expression.  Action he found in a measure, but no words.  He took Miriam passionately into his arms as they stood there in the gathering dusk upon the staircase of that haunted and terrible building, and Miriam it was who found the words upon which they separated and went quietly away to the solitude each needed for the soul.

“We’ll leave the gods alone,” she said with gentle decision, yet making it seem as though she appealed to his greater strength and wisdom to decide; “I want nothing but you—­you and Winky.  And all you really want is me.”

But in his room he heard the vibrations of the clergyman’s voice rising up through the floor and walls as he practiced in the cellar the sounds with which the ancient Hebrews concealed the Tetragrammaton:  YOD—­HE—­VAU—­HE:  JEHOVAH—­JAHVE—­of which the approaching great experiment, however, concerned itself only with the opening vibrations of the first letter—­YOD....

And, as he listened, he hesitated again ... wondering after all whether Miriam was right.

III

It was towards the end of their short silent dinner that very night—­the silence due to the fact that everybody was intently listening—­when Spinrobin caught the whisper of a singular faint sound that he took first to be the rising of wind.  The wind sometimes came down that way with curious gulps from the terraces of the surrounding moors.  Yet in this sound was none of that rush and sigh that the hills breed.  It did not drop across the curves of the world; it rose from the center.

He looked up sharply, then at once realized that the sound was not outside at all, but inside—­inside the very room where he sat facing Skale and Miriam.  Then something in his soul recognized it.  It was the first wave in an immense vibration.

Something stretched within him as foam stretches on the elastic side of a heaped Atlantic roller, retreated, then came on again with a second gigantic crest.  The rhythm of the huge sound had caught him.  The life in him expanded awfully, rose to far summits, dropped to utter depths.  A sense of glowing exaltation swept through him as though wings of power lifted his heart with enormous ascendancy.  The biggest passions of his soul stirred—­the sweetest dreams, yearnings, aspirations he had ever known were blown to fever heat.  Above all, his passion for Miriam waxed tumultuous and possessed him.