“We should lose this,” she exclaimed; “there’s none of this ... in heaven!  The earth, the earth, the dear, beautiful earth, with you ... and Winky ... is what I want!”

And when he stopped her outburst with a kiss, fully understanding the profound truth she so quaintly expressed, he smelt the trees and mountains in her hair, and her fragrance was mingled there with the fragrance of that old earth on which they stood.

VII

The rising flood of sound sent them charging ahead the same minute, for it seemed upon them with a rush; and it was only after much stumbling and floundering among trees and boulders that they emerged into the open space of the hills beyond the woods.  Actually, perhaps, they had been running for twenty minutes, but to them it seemed that they had been running for days.  They stood still and looked about them.

“You shall never regret, never, never,” Miriam whispered quickly.  “I can make you happier than all this ever could,” and she waved her arm towards the house below.  “And you know it, my little Master.”

But before he could reply, or do more than place an arm about her waist to support her, something came to pass that communicated its message to their souls with an incalculable certainty neither could explain.  Perhaps it was that distance enabled them to distinguish between the sounds more clearly, or perhaps their beings were still so intimately connected with Skale that some psychic warning traveled up to them across the night; but at any rate there then came about this sharp and sudden change in the quality of the sound-tempest round them that proclaimed the arrival of an exceedingly dramatic moment.  The nature of the rushing, flying vibrations underwent alteration.  And, looking one another in the eyes, they realized what it meant.

“He’s beginning ...” faltered Spinrobin in some skeleton of a voice.  “Skale has begun to utter...!” He said it beneath his breath.

Down in the cellar of that awful house the giant clergyman, alone and undismayed, had begun to call the opening vibration of the living chord which was to gather in this torrent of escaping Letters and unite them in temporary safety in the crypts of the prepared vault.  For the first time in eighteen hundred years the initial sound of the “Name that rusheth through the universe”—­the first sound of its opening syllable, that is—­was about to thunder its incalculable message over the earth.

Crouching close against each other they stood there on the edge of the woods, the night darkly smothering about them, the bare, open hills lying beyond in the still sky, waiting for the long-apprehended climax—­the utterance of the first great syllable.

“It will make him ... as God,” crashed the thought through Spinrobin’s brain as he experienced the pangs of the fiercest remorse he had ever known.  “Even without our two notes the power will be sublime...!”