“Listen, and you shall presently hear her name,” the clergyman whispered, glancing up at the other over his teacup, but Spinrobin was crunching his toast too noisily to notice the meaning of the words fully.

II

The Stage Manager who stands behind all the scenes of life, both great and small, had prepared the scene well for what was to follow.  The sentences about the world of inaudible sound had dropped the right kind of suggestion into the secretary’s heart.  His mind still whirred with a litter of half-digested sentences and ideas, however, and he was vividly haunted by the actuality of truth behind them all.  His whole inner being at that moment cried “Hark!” through a hush of expectant wonder.

There they sat at tea, this singular group of human beings:  Mr. Skale, bigger than ever in his loose housesuit of black, swallowing his liquid with noisy gulps; Spinrobin, nibbling slippery morsels of hot toast, on the edge of his chair; Miriam, quiet and mysterious, in her corner; and Mrs. Mawle, sedate, respectful in cap and apron, presiding over the teapot, the whole scene cozily lit by lamp and fire—­when this remarkable new thing happened.  Spinrobin declares always that it came upon him like a drowning wave, frightening him not with any idea of injury to himself, but with a dreadful sense of being lost and shelterless among the immensities of a transcendent new world.  Something passed into the room that made his soul shake and flutter at the center.

His attention was first roused by a sound that he took, perhaps, to be the wind coming down from the hills in those draughts and gusts he sometimes heard, only to his imagination now it was a peopled wind crying round the walls, behind whose voice he detected the great fluid form of it—­running and colored.  But, with the noise, a terror that was no ordinary terror invaded the recesses of his soul.  It was the fear of the Unknown, dreadfully multiplied.

He glanced up quickly from his teacup, and chancing to meet Miriam’s eye, he saw that she was smiling as she watched him.  This sound, then, had some special significance.  At the same instant he perceived that it was not outside but in the room, close beside him, that Mr. Skale, in fact, was talking to the deaf housekeeper in a low and carefully modulated tone—­a tone she could not possibly have heard, however.  Then he discovered that the clergyman was not speaking actually, but repeating her name.  He was intoning it.  It grew into a kind of singing chant, an incantation.

“Sarah Mawle ...  Sarah Mawle ...  Sarah Mawle ...” ran through the room like water.  And, in Skale’s mouth, it sounded as his own name had sounded—­different.  It became in some significant way—­thus Spinrobin expresses it always—­stately, important, nay, even august.  It became real.  The syllables led his ear away from their normal signification—­away from the outer toward the inner.  His ordinary mental picture of the mere letters SARAHMAWLE disappeared and became merged in something else—­into something alive that pulsed and moved with vibrations of its own.  For, with the outer sound there grew up another interior one, that finally became separate and distinct.