And the whole gigantic glory of Skale’s purpose came upon him like a tempest.  The magnificent effrontery by which the man sought to storm his way to heaven again laid its spell upon him.  The reaction was of amazing swiftness.  It almost seemed as though time ceased to operate, so instantaneously did his mood pass from terror to elation—­wild, ecstatic elation that could dare anything and everything to share in the awful delight and wonder of Skale’s transcendent experiment.

And so, forgetting himself and his little disabilities of terror and shrinking, he sought once again for the note he was to utter in the chord.  And this time he found it.

V

Very faintly, yet distinctly audible in the deep stillness, it sounded far away down in the deeps of his being.  And, with a splendid spiritual exultation tearing and swelling in his heart, he turned at once triumphantly to Miriam beside him.

“Utter your note too!” he cried.  “Utter it with mine, for any moment now we shall hear the command from the cellar....  Be ready...!”

And the FORM, meanwhile, limned in the wonder of an undecipherable or at least untranslatable geometry, silently roaring, enthroned in the undiscoverable colors beyond the spectrum, swept towards them as he spoke.

At the same instant Miriam answered him, her exquisite little face set like a rock, her marble pallor painted with the glory of the approaching splendors.  Just when the moment of success was upon them; when the flying Letters were abroad; when all the difficult weeks of preparation were face to face with the consummation; and when any moment Skale’s booming bass might rise from the bowels of the building as the signal to utter the great chord and unite the fragments of the first divine syllable; when Spinrobin had at last conquered his weakness and recovered his note—­then, at this decisive and supreme moment, Miriam asserted herself and took the reins of command.

“No,” she said, looking with sudden authority straight into his eyes, “no!  I will not utter the note.  Nor shall you utter yours!” And she clapped her little hand tight upon his mouth.

In that instant of unutterable surprise the two great forces of his life and personality met together with an explosive violence wholly beyond his power to control.  For on the one hand lay the fierce enticement of Skale’s heaven, with all that it portended, and on the other the deep though temporarily submerged human passion of his love for the girl.  Miriam’s sudden action revealed the truth to him better than any argument.  In a flash he realized that her choice was made, and that she was in entire and final revolt against the whole elaborate experiment and all that it involved.  The risk of losing her Spinny, or finding him changed in some condition of redemption where he would no longer be the little human thing she so dearly loved, had helped her to this final, swift conclusion.