“I’m game, Mr. Skale,” he said simply, forgetting all his recent doubts and terrors.

“I know you are,” the clergyman replied.  “I knew it all along.”

Chapter X

I

The first thing Spinrobin knew when he ran upstairs to lock away the money in his desk was that his whole being, without his directing it, asked a question of momentous import.  He did not himself ask it deliberately.  He surprised his sub-consciousness asking it: 

“WHAT IS THIS NAME THAT PHILIP SKALE FOREVER SEEKS?”

It was no longer mere curiosity that asked it, but that sense of responsibility which in all men of principle and character lies at the root of action and of life.  And Spinrobin, for all his little weaknesses, was a man of character and principle.  There came a point when he could no longer follow blindly where others led, even though the leader were so grand an individual as Philip Skale.  This point is reached at varying degrees of the moral thermometer, and but for the love that Miriam had wakened in his heart, it might have taken much longer to send the mercury of his will so high in so short a time.  He now felt responsibility for two, and in the depths of his queer, confused, little mind stirred the thought that possibly after all the great adventure he sought was only the supreme adventure of a very wonderful Love.

He records these two questions at this point, and it is only just to himself, therefore, to set them down here.  To neither was the answer yet forthcoming.

For some days the routine of this singular household followed its normal course, the only change being that while the secretary practiced his Hebrew names and studied the relations between sound, color, form and the rest, he kept himself a little better in hand, for Love is a mighty humanizer and holds down the nose upon the grindstone of the wholesome and practical values of existence.  He turned, so to speak, and tried to face the matter squarely; to see the adventure as a whole; to get all round it and judge.  It seems, however, that he was too much in the thick of it to get that bird’s-eye view which reduces details to the right proportion.  Skale’s personality was too close, and flooded him too violently.  Spinrobin remained confused and bewildered; but also unbelievably happy.

“Coming out all right,” he wrote shakily in that gilt-edged diary.  “Beginning to understand why I’m in the world.  Am just as important as anybody else—­really.  Impossible explain more.”  His entries were very like telegrams, in which a man attempts to express in a lucid shorthand all manner of things that the actual words hardly compass.  And life itself is not unlike some mighty telegram that seeks vainly to express, between the extremes of silence and excess, all that the soul would say....