In the hall the roar increased terrifically about his ears.  Skale, in his biggest booming voice, was uttering the names of Hebrew “angels”—­invoking forces, that is, to his help; and behind him Mrs. Mawle was singing—­singing fragments apparently of the “note” she had to utter, as well as fragments of her own “true name” thus magically recovered.  Her restored arm gyrated furiously, her tripping youth spelt witchery.  Yet the whole madness of the scene came to Spinrobin with a freezing wind of terror; for about it was a lawless, audacious blasphemy, that must surely win for itself a quite appalling punishment....

Yet nothing happened at once—­nothing destructive, at least.  Skale and the housekeeper, he saw, were hurriedly robing themselves in the red and yellow surplices that hung from nails in the hall, and the instinct to laugh at the sight was utterly overwhelmed when he remembered that these were the colors which were used for safety in their respective “rooms.” ...  It was a scene of wild confusion and bewilderment which the memory refuses to reproduce coherently.  In his own throat already began a passionate rising of sound that he knew was the “note” he had to utter attempting to escape, summoned forth automatically by these terrible vibrating Letters in the air.  A cataract of sound seemed to fill the building and made it shake to its very foundations.

But the hall, he saw, was not only alive with “music,” it was ablaze with light—­a white and brilliant glory that at first dazzled him to the point of temporary blindness.

The same second Mr. Skale’s voice, storming its way somehow above the tumult, made itself heard: 

“To the rooms upstairs, Spinrobin!  To the corridor with Miriam!  And when you hear my voice from the cellar—­utter!  We may yet be in time to unite the Letters...!”

He released the secretary’s hand, flinging it from him, and was off with a bounding, leaping motion like an escaped animal towards the stone passage that led to the cellar steps; and Spinrobin, turning about himself like a top in a perfect frenzy of bewilderment, heard his great voice as he disappeared round the corner: 

“It has come upon me like a thief in the night!  Before I am fully prepared it has called me!  May the powers of the Name have mercy upon my soul...!” And he was gone.  For the last time had Spinrobin set his eyes upon the towering earthly form of the Rev. Philip Skale.

IV

Then, at first, it seems, the old enthusiasm caught him, and with him, therefore, caught Miriam, too.  That savage and dominant curiosity to know clutched him, overpowering even the assaults of a terror that fairly battered him.  Through all the chaos and welter of his dazed mind he sought feverishly for the “note” he had to utter, yet found it not, for he was too horribly confused.  Fiddles, sand-patterns, colored robes, gongs, giant tuning-forks, wax-sheeted walls, aged-faces-turned-young and caverns-by-the-sea jostled one another in his memory with a jumble of disproportion quite inextricable.