Spinrobin’s heart leaped with excitement as he listened, for this idea of “Naming True” carried him back to the haunted days of his childhood clairvoyance when he had known Winky.

“I don’t quite understand, Mr. Skale,” he put in, desirous to hear a more detailed explanation.

“But presently you shall,” was all the clergyman vouchsafed.

The clue thus provided by chance he had followed up, but by methods hard to describe apparently.  A corner of the veil, momentarily lifted, had betrayed the value that lies in the repetition of certain sounds—­the rhythmic reiteration of syllables—­in a word, of chanting or incantation.  By diving down into his subconscious region, already prepared by long spiritual training, he gradually succeeded in drawing out further details piece by piece, and finally by infinite practice and prayer welding them together into an intelligible system.  The science of true-naming slowly, with the efforts of years, revealed itself.  His mind slipped past the deceit of mere sensible appearances.  Clair-audiently he heard the true inner names of things and persons....

Mr. Skale rose from his chair.  With thumbs in the armholes of his waistcoat and fingers drumming loudly on his breast he stood over the secretary, who continued making frantic notes.

“That chance discovery, then, made during a moment’s inner vision,” he continued with a grave excitement, “gave me the key to a whole world of new knowledge, and since then I have made incredible developments.  Listen closely, Mr. Spinrobin, while I explain.  And take in what you can.”

The secretary laid down his pencil and notebook.  He sat forward in an attitude of intense eagerness upon the edge of his chair.  He was trembling.  This strange modern confirmation of his early Heaven of wonder before the senses had thickened and concealed it, laid bare again his earliest world of far-off pristine glory.

“The ordinary name of a person, understand then, is merely a sound attached to their physical appearance at birth by the parents—­a meaningless sound.  It is not their true name.  That, however, exists behind it in the spiritual world, and is the accurate description of the soul.  It is the sound you express visibly before me.  The Word is the Life.”

Spinrobin surreptitiously picked up his pencil; but the clergyman spied the movement.  “Never mind the notes,” he said; “listen closely to me.”  Spinrobin obeyed meekly.

“Your ordinary outer name, however,” continued Mr. Skale, speaking with profound conviction, “may be made a conductor to your true, inner one.  The connection between the two by a series of subtle interior links forms gradually with the years.  For even the ordinary name, if you reflect a moment, becomes in time a sound of singular authority—­inwoven with the finest threads of your psychical being, so that in a sense you become it.  To hear it suddenly called aloud in the night—­in a room full of people, in the street unexpectedly—­is to know a shock, however small, of increased vitality.  It touches the imagination.  It calls upon the soul built up around it.”