Moreover, all that he had heard and seen, fantastic and strained as he felt it to be, possibly even the product of religious mania, was nevertheless profoundly disquieting, for mixed up with it somewhere or other was—­truth.  Mr. Skale had made a discovery—­a giant one; it was not all merely talk and hypnotism, the glamour of words.  His great Experiment would prove to be real and terrible.  He had discovered certain uses of sound, occult yet scientific, and if he, Spinrobin, elected to stay on, he would be obliged to play his part in the denouement.  And this thought from the very beginning appalled while it fascinated him.  It filled him with a kind of horrible amazement.  For the object the clergyman sought, though not yet disclosed, already cast its monstrous shadow across his path.  He somehow discerned that it would deal directly with knowledge the saner judgment of a commonplace world had always deemed undesirable, unlawful, unsafe, dangerous to the souls that dared attempt it, failure involving a pitiless and terrible Nemesis.

He lay in bed watching the play of the firelight upon the high ceiling, and thinking in confused fashion of the huge clergyman with his thundering voice, his great lambent eyes and his seductive gentleness; of his singular speculations and his hints, half menacing, half splendid, of things to come.  Then he thought of the housekeeper with her deafness and her withered arm, and that white peace about her face; and, lastly, of Miriam, soft, pale beneath her dark skin, her gem-like eyes ever finding his own, and of the intimate personal relations so swiftly established between them....

It was, indeed, a singular household thus buried away in the heart of these lonely mountains.  The stately old mansion was just the right setting for—­for—­

Unbidden into his mind a queer, new thought shot suddenly, interrupting the flow of ideas.  He never understood how or whence it came, but with the picture of all the empty rooms in the corridor about him, he received the sharp unwelcome impression that when Mr. Skale described the house as empty it was really nothing of the sort.  Utterly unannounced, the uneasy conviction took possession of him that the building was actually—­populated.  It was an extraordinary idea to have.  There was absolutely nothing in the way of evidence to support it.  And with it flashed across his memory echoes of that unusual catechism he had been subjected to—­in particular the questions whether he believed in spirits,—­“other life,” as Skale termed it.  Sinister suspicions flashed through his imagination as he lay there listening to the ashes dropping in the grate and watching the shadows cloak the room.  Was it possible that there were occupants of these rooms that the man had somehow evoked from the interstellar spaces and crystallized by means of sound into form and shape—­created?