“My sweet Master, my sweet Master!”

But he did not run far.  About him on every side the night lifted as though it were suddenly day.  He saw the summits of the bleak mountains agleam with the reflection of some great light that rushed upon them from the valley.  All the desolate landscape, hesitating like some hovering ocean between the old pattern and the new, seemed to hang suspended amid the desolation of the winter skies.  Everything roared.  It seemed the ground shook.  The very bones of the woods went shuddering together; the hills toppled; and overhead, in some incredible depths of space, boomed sounds as though the heavens split off into fragments and hurled the constellations about the vault to swell these shattering thunders of a collapsing world.

The Letters of that terrible and august Name were passing over the face of the universe—­distorted because mispronounced—­creative sounds, disheveled and monstrous, because incompletely and incorrectly uttered.

“Put me down,” he heard Miriam cry where she lay smothered in his arms, “and we can face everything together, and be safe.  Our love is bigger than it all and will protect us....”

“Because it is complete,” he cried incoherently in reply, seizing the truth of her thought, and setting her upon the ground; “it includes even this.  It is a part of ... the Name ... correctly uttered ... for it is true and pure.”

He heard her calling his inner name, and he began forthwith to call her own as they stood there clinging to one another, mingling arms and hair and lips in such a tumult of passion that it seemed as though all this outer convulsion of the world was a small matter compared to the commotion in their own hearts, revolutionized by the influx of a divine love that sought to melt them into a single being.

And as they looked down into the valley at their feet, too bewildered to resist these mighty forces that stole the breath from their throats and the strength from their muscles, they saw with a clearness as of day that the House of Awe in which their love had wakened and matured was passing away and being utterly consumed.

In a flame of white fire, tongued and sheeted, streaked with gulfs of black, and most terribly roaring, it rose with a prodigious crackling of walls and roof towards the sky.  Volumes of colored smoke, like hills moving, went with it; and with it, too, went the forms—­the substance of their forms, at least, of their “sounds” released—­of Philip Skale, Mrs. Mawle, and all the paraphernalia of gongs, drapery, wires, sheeted walls, sand-patterns, and the preparations of a quarter of a century of labor and audacious research.  For nothing could possibly survive in such a furnace.  The heat of it struck their faces where they stood even here high upon the hills, and the currents of rising wind blew the girl’s tresses across his eyes and moved his own feathery hair upon his head.  The notes of those leaping flames were like thunder.