Trivial details, presenting themselves in really dramatic moments, may impress the mind with extraordinary aptness.  At this very moment Spinrobin’s eyes noticed in the corner of wall and door a tiny spider’s web, with the spider itself hanging in the center of its little net—­shaking.  And he has never forgotten it.  It expressed pictorially exactly what he felt himself.  He, too, felt that he was shaking in midair—­as in the center of a web whose strands hung suspended from the very stars.

And the words, spoken in that slow deep whisper, filled the little space in which the two men stood, and somehow completed for Spinrobin the sense of stupendous things adequately approached.

Then Mr. Skale closed the outer door, shutting out the last feeble glimmer of day, at the same moment turning the handle of the portal beyond.  And as they entered the darkness, Spinrobin, holding up his violet robe with one hand to prevent tripping, with the other caught hold of the tail of the flowing garment in front of him.  For a second or two he stopped breathing altogether.

V

On the very threshold a soft murmur of beauty met them; and, as plainly as though the darkness had lifted into a blaze of light, the secretary at once realized that he stood in the presence of something greater than all he had hitherto known in this world.  He had managed to find the clergyman’s big hand, and he held it tightly through a twisted corner of his voluminous robe.  The inner door next closed behind them.  Skale, he was aware, had again stooped in the darkness to the level of his ear.

“I’ll give you the sound—­the note,” he heard him whisper.  “Utter it inwardly—­in your thoughts only.  Its vibrations correspond to the color, and will protect us.”

“Protect us?” gasped Spinrobin with dry lips.

“From being shattered and destroyed—­owing to the intense activity of the vibrations conveyed to our ultimate physical atoms,” was the whispered reply, as the clergyman proceeded to give him under his breath a one-syllable sound that was unlike any word he knew, and that for the life of him he has never been able to reproduce since.

Mr. Skale straightened himself up again and Spinrobin pictured him standing there twice his natural size, a huge and impressive figure as he had once before seen him, clothed now with the double dignity of his strange knowledge.  Then, advancing slowly to the center of the room, they stood still, each uttering silently in his thoughts the syllable that attuned their inner beings to safety.

Almost immediately, as the seconds passed, the secretary became aware that the room was beginning to shake with a powerful but regular movement.  All about him had become alive.  Vitality, like the vitality of youth upon mountain tops, pulsed and whirled about them, pouring into them the currents of a rushing glorious life, undiluted, straight from the source.  In his little person he felt both the keenness of sharp steel and the vast momentum of a whole ocean.  Thus he describes it.  And the more clearly he uttered in his thoughts the sound given to him by his leader, the greater seemed the influx of strength and glory into his heart.