This, moreover, had now happened twice, so that imagination seemed a far-fetched explanation.  And on both occasions the clergyman had remained invisible on the day following until the evening, and had then reappeared, quiet and as usual, but with an atmosphere of immense vibratory force somehow about his person, and a glow in his face and eyes that at moments seemed positively colored.

No word of explanation, however, had as yet been forthcoming of these omens, and Spinrobin waited with what patience he could, meanwhile, for the final test which he knew to be close upon him.  And in his diary, the pages usually left blank now because words failed him, he wrote a portion of Anone’s cry that had caught his memory and expressed a little of what he felt: 

... for fiery thoughts
Do shape themselves within me, more and more,
Whereof I catch the issue, as I hear
Dead sounds at night come from the inmost hills,
Like footsteps upon wool....

II

It was within three days of the expiration of his trial month that he then had this conversation with the clergyman, which he understood quite well was offered by way of preparation for the bigger tests about to come.  He has reported what he could of it; it seemed to him at the time both plausible and absurd; it was of a piece, that is, with the rest of the whole fabulous adventure.

Mr. Skale, as they walked over the snowy moors in the semi-darkness between tea and dinner, had been speaking to him about the practical results obtainable by sound-vibrations (what he already knew for that matter), and how it is possible by fiddling long enough upon a certain note to fiddle down a bridge and split it asunder.  From that he passed on to the scientific fact that the ultimate molecules of matter are not only in constant whirring motion, but that also they do not actually touch one another.  The atoms composing the point of a pin, for instance, shift and change without ceasing, and—­there is space between them.

Then, suddenly taking Spinrobin’s arm, he came closer, his booming tone dropping to a whisper: 

“To change the form of anything,” he said in his ear, “is merely to change the arrangement of those dancing molecules, to alter their rate of vibration.”  His eyes, even in the obscurity of the dusk, went across the other’s face like flames.

“By means of sound?” asked the other, already beginning to feel eerie.

The clergyman nodded his great head in acquiescence.

“Just as the vibrations of heat-waves,” he said after a pause, “can alter the form of a metal by melting it, so the vibrations of sound can alter the form of a thing by inserting themselves between those whirling molecules and changing their speed and arrangement—­change the outline, that is.”

The idea seemed fairly to buffet the little secretary in the face, but Mr. Skale’s proximity was too overpowering to permit of very clear thinking.  Feeling that a remark was expected from him, he managed to ejaculate an obvious objection in his mind.