Something freezing swept into him from a region far beyond the world.  He shivered.  These cold terrors that grip the soul suddenly without apparent cause, whence do they come?  Why, out of these rather extravagant and baseless speculations, should have emerged this sense of throttling dread that appalled him?  And why, once again, should he have felt convinced that the ultimate nature of the clergyman’s great experiment was impious, fraught with a kind of heavenly danger, “unpermissible?”

Spinrobin, lying there shivering in his big bed, could not guess.  He only knew that by way of relief his mind instinctively sought out Miriam, and so found peace.  Curled up in a ball between the sheets his body presently slept, while his mind, intensely active, traveled off into that vast inner prairie of his childhood days and called her name aloud.  And presumably she came to him at once, for his sleep was undisturbed and his dreams uncommonly sweet, and he woke thoroughly refreshed eight hours later, to find Mrs. Mawle standing beside his bed with thin bread and butter and a cup of steaming tea.

II

For the rest, the new secretary fell quickly and easily into the routine of this odd little household, for he had great powers of adaptability.  At first the promise of excitement faded.  The mornings were spent in the study of Hebrew, Mr. Skale taking great pains to instruct him in the vibratory pronunciation (for so he termed it) of certain words, and especially of the divine, or angelic, names.  The correct utterance, involving a kind of prolonged and sonorous vibration of the vowels, appeared to be of supreme importance.  He further taught him curious correspondences between Sound and Number, and the attribution to these again of certain colors.  The vibrations of sound and light, as air and ether, had intrinsic importance, it seemed, in the uttering of certain names; all of which, however, Spinrobin learnt by rote, making neither head nor tail of it.

That there were definite results, though, he could not deny—­psychic results; for a name uttered correctly produced one effect, and uttered wrongly produced another ... just as a wrong note in a chord afflicts the hearer whereas the right one blesses....

The afternoons, wet or fine, they went for long walks together about the desolate hills, Miriam sometimes accompanying them.  Their talk and laughter echoed all over the mountains, but there was no one to hear them, the nearest village being several miles away and the railway station—­nothing but a railway station.  The isolation was severe; there were no callers but the bi-weekly provision carts; letters had to be fetched and newspapers were neglected.