Then, with equal swiftness, it passed.  His present surroundings came back.  He dropped with a dizzy rush from awful spaces ... and was aware that he was merely—­standing on the black, woolly mat before the fire watching the movements of his new employer, that his pumps were bright and pointed, his head just level with a dark marble mantelpiece.  Dazed, and a trifle breathless he felt; and at the back of his disordered mind stirred a schoolboy’s memory that the Pythagoreans believed the universe to have been called out of chaos by Sound, Number, and Harmony—­or something to that effect....  But these huge, fugitive thoughts that tore through him refused to be seized and dealt with.  He staggered a little, mentally; then, with a prodigious effort, controlled himself—­and watched.

III

Mr. Skale, he saw, had fastened the little sheet of glass by its four corners to silken strings hanging from the ceiling.  The glass plate hung, motionless and horizontal, in the air with its freight of sand.  For several minutes the clergyman played a series of beautiful modulations in double-stopping upon the violin.  In these the dominating influence was E flat.  Spinrobin was not musical enough to describe it more accurately than this.  Only, with greater skill than he knows, he mentions how Skale drew out of that fiddle the peculiarly intimate and searching tones by which strings can reach the spiritual center of a man and make him respond to delicate vibrations of thoughts beyond his normal gamut....

Spinrobin, listening, understood that he was a greater man than he knew....

And the sand on the glass sheet, he next became aware, was shifting, moving, dancing.  He heard the tiny hissing and rattling of the dry grains.  It was uncommonly weird.  This visible and practical result made the clergyman’s astonishing words seem true and convincing.  That moving sand brought sanity, yet a certain curious terror of the unknown into it all.

A minute later Mr. Skale stopped playing and beckoned to him.

“See,” he said quietly, pointing to the arrangement the particles of sand had assumed under the influence of the vibrations.  “There’s your pattern—­your sound made visible.  That’s your utterance—­the Note you substantially represent and body forth in terms of matter.”

The secretary stared.  It was a charming but very simple pattern the lines of sand had assumed, not unlike the fronds of a delicate fern growing out of several small circles round the base.

“So that’s my note—­made visible!” he exclaimed under his breath.  “It’s delightful; it’s quite exquisite.”

“That’s E flat,” returned Mr. Skale in a whisper, so as not to disturb the pattern; “if I altered the note, the pattern would alter too.  E natural, for instance, would be different.  Only, luckily, you are E flat—­just the note we want.  And now,” he continued, straightening himself up to his full height, “come over and see mine and Miriam’s and Mrs. Mawle’s, and you’ll understand what I meant when I said that yours would harmonize.”  And in a glass case across the room they examined a number of square sheets of glass with sand upon them in various patterns, all rendered permanent by a thin coating of a glue-like transparent substance that held the particles in position.