The thought that God, as it were, had called him and he had been afraid to run and answer to his name overpowered his timid, aching soul with such a flood of emotion that he found himself struggling with a glorious temptation to tear down the mountainside again to the house and play his appointed part—­utter his note in the chord even thus late.  For the essential bitterness and pain that lies at the heart of all transitory earthly things—­the gnawing sense of incompleteness and vanity that touches the section of transitory existence men call “life,” met face to face with this passing glimpse of reality, timeless and unconditioned, which the sound of the splendid name flashed so terrifically before his awakened soul-vision,—­and threatened to overwhelm him.

In another instant he would have yielded and gone; forgotten even Miriam, and all the promised sweetness of life with her half-planned, when something came to pass abruptly that threw his will and all his little calculations into a dark chaos of amazement where, by a kind of electrically swift reaction, he realized that the one true, possible and right thing for him was this very love he was about to cast aside.  His highest destiny was upon the unchanged old earth ... with Miriam ... and Winky....

She turned and flung her arms round his neck in a passion of tears as though she had divined his unspoken temptation ... and at the same time this awful new thing was upon them both.  It caught them like a tempest.  For a disharmony—­a discord—­a lying sound was loose upon the air from those two voices far below.

“Call me by my true name,” she cried quickly, in an anguish of terror; “for my soul is afraid....  Oh, love me most utterly, utterly, utterly ... and save me!”

Unnerved and shaking like a leaf, Spinrobin pressed her against his heart.

“I know you by name and you are mine,” he tried to say, but the words never left his lips.  It was the love surging up in his tortured heart that alone held him to sanity and prevented—­as it seemed to him in that appalling moment—­the dissolution of his very being and hers.

For Philip Skale had somewhere uttered falsely.

A darting zigzag crack, as of lightning, ran over the giant fabric of vibrations that covered the altering world as with a flood ... and sounds that no man may hear and not die leaped awfully into being.  The suddenness and immensity of the catastrophe blinded these two listening children-souls.  Awe and terror usurped all other feelings ... but one.  Their love, being born of the spirit, held supreme, insulating them, so to speak, from all invading disasters.

Philip Skale had made a mistake in the pronunciation of the Name.

The results were dreadful and immediate, and from all the surface of the wakening world rose anguished voices.  Spinrobin started up, lifting Miriam into his arms.  He spun dizzily for a moment between boulders and trees, giving out a great wailing cry, unearthly enough had there been any to hear it.  Then he began to run wildly through the thick darkness.  In his ear—­for her head lay close—­he heard her dear voice, between the sobs of collapse, calling his inner name most sweetly; and the sound summoned to the front all in him that was best and manly.