With her hand tight over his lips, and her face of white decision before him, he understood.  She called him with those big grey eyes to the sweet and common uses of life, instead of to the heights of some audacious heaven where they might be as gods with Philip Skale.  She clung to humanity.  And Spinrobin, seeing her at last with spiritual eyes fully opened, knew finally that she was right.

“But oh,” he always cries, “in that moment I knew the most terrible choice I have ever had to make, for it was not a choice between life and death, but a choice between two lives, each of infinite promised wonder.  And what do you think it was that decided me, and made me choose the wholesome, humble life with little Miriam in preference to the grandeur of Skale’s vast dream?  What do you think?” And his face always turns pink and then flame-colored as he asks it, hesitating absurdly before giving the answer.  “I’ll tell you, because you’d never guess in this world.”  And then he lowers his voice and says, “It was the delicious little sweet perfume of her fingers as she held them over my lips....!”

That delicate, faint smell was the symbol of human happiness, and through all the whirlwind of sound and color about him, it somehow managed to convey its poignant, searching message of the girl’s utter love straight into his heart.  Thus curiously out of proportion and insignificant, indeed, are sometimes the decisive details that in moments of overwhelming experience turn the course of life’s river this way or that....

With a single wild cry in his soul that found no audible expression, he gave up the unequal struggle.  He turned, and with Miriam by his side, flew down the corridor from the advent of the Immensity that was upon them—­from the approach of the escaping Letters.

VI

How Spinrobin found his way out of that sound-stricken house remains an unsolved mystery.  He never understood it himself; he remembers only that when they reached the ground floor the vibrations of Skale’s opening bass note had already begun.  Its effect, too, was immediately noticeable.  For the roar of the escaping Letters, which upstairs had reached so immense a volume as to be recognized only in terms of silence, now suddenly grew in a measure harnessed and restrained.  Their vibration became reduced—­down closer to the sixteen-foot wavelength which is the limit of human audition.  They were being leashed in by the summoning master-tone.  They grew once more audible.

On the rising swirl of sound the two humans were swept down passages and across halls, as two leaves are borne by a tempest, and after frantic efforts, in which Spinrobin bruised his body against doors and walls without number, he found himself at last in the open air, and at a considerable distance from the house of terror.  Stars shone overhead.  He saw the outline of hills.  Breaths of cool wind fanned his burning skin and eyes.