Arrayed in fluffy tweeds, with baggy knickerbockers and heavily-nailed boots, he trotted beside his giant companion over the moors, somewhat like a child who expected its hand to be taken over difficult places.  His confidence had been completely won.  The sense of shyness left him.  He felt that he already stood to the visionary clergyman in a relationship that was more than secretarial.  He still panted, but with enthusiasm instead of with regret.  In the background loomed always the dim sense of the Discovery and Experiment approaching inevitably, just as in childhood the idea of Heaven and Hell had stood waiting to catch him—­real only when he thought carefully about them.  Skale was just the kind of man, he felt, who would make a discovery, so simple that the rest of the world had overlooked it, so tremendous that it struck at the roots of human knowledge.  He had the simple originality of genius, and a good deal of its inspirational quality as well.

Before ten days had passed he was following him about like a dog, hanging upon his lightest word.  New currents ran through him mentally and spiritually as the fires of Mr. Skale’s vivid personality quickened his own, and the impetus of his inner life lifted him with its more violent momentum.  The world of an ordinary man is so circumscribed, so conventionally molded, that he can scarcely conceive of things that may dwell normally in the mind of an extraordinary man.  Adumbrations of these, however, may throw their shadow across his field of vision.  Spinrobin was ordinary in most ways, while Mr. Skale was un-ordinary in nearly all; and thus, living together in this intimate solitude, the secretary got peeps into his companion’s region that gradually convinced him.  With cleaned nerves and vision he began to think in ways and terms that were new to him.  Skale, like some big figure in story or legend, moved forward into his life and waved a wand.  His own smaller personality began to expand; thoughts entered unannounced that hitherto had not even knocked at the door, and the frontiers of his mind first wavered, then unfolded to admit them.

The clergyman’s world, whether he himself were mad or sane, was a real world, alive, vibrating, shortly to produce practical results.  Spinrobin would have staked his very life upon it....

And, meanwhile, he made love openly—­under any other conditions, outrageously—­to Miriam, whose figure of soft beauty moving silently about the house helped to redeem it.  She rendered him quiet little services of her own accord that pleased him immensely, for occasionally he detected her delicate perfume about his room, and he was sure it was not Mrs. Mawle who put the fresh heather in the glass jars upon his table, or arranged his papers with such neat precision on the desk.