“If—­all goes well” she repeated, horrified.  Then, after a pause, she added:  “You mean—­that he might make a mistake—­or—?”

And Spinrobin, drinking in the sweet breath that bore the words so softly from her lips, answered, measuring his words with ponderous gravity as though each conveyed a sentence of life or death, “If—­all—­goes—­well.”

She watched him with something of that utter clinging mother-love in her eyes that claims any degree of suffering gladly rather than the loss of her own—­passionately welcoming misery in preference to loss.  She, too, had divined the alternative.

Then, kissing his cheeks and eyes and lips, she untied his arms from about her neck and ran, blushing furiously, from the room.  And with her went doubt, for the first time—­doubt as to the success of the great experiment—­doubt as to their Leader’s power.

II

And while Spinrobin still sat there, trembling with the two passions that tore his soul in twain—­the passion to climb forbidden skies with Skale, and the passion to know sweet human love with Miriam—­there came thundering into the room no less a personage than the giant clergyman, straight from those haunted rooms.  Pallor hung about his face, but there was a light radiating through it—­a high, luminous whiteness—­that made the secretary think of his childhood’s pictures of the Hebrew prophet descending from Mount Sinai, the glory of internal spheres still reflected upon the skin and eyes.  Skale, like a flame and a wind, came pouring into the room.  The thing he had remained upstairs to complete had clearly proved successful.  The experiment had moved another stage—­almost the final one—­nearer accomplishment.

The reaction was genuinely terrific.  Spinrobin felt himself swept away beyond all power of redemption.  Miriam and the delicious human life faded into insignificance again.  What, in the name of the eternal fires, were a girl’s lips and love compared to the possibilities of Olympian achievement promised by Skale’s golden audacities?  Earth faded before the lights of heaven.  The whole tide of human emotion was nothing compared to a drop of this terrible salt brine from seas in unknown stars....  As usual Skale’s personality caught him up into some seventh heaven of the soaring imagination.

“Spinrobin, my glorious companion in adventure,” thundered the clergyman, “your note suits perfectly the chord!  I am delighted beyond all words.  You chime with amazing precision and accuracy into the complex Master-Tone I need for the proper pronunciation of the Name!  Your coming has been an inspiration permitted of Him who owns it.”  His excitement was profoundly moving.  The man was in earnest if ever man was.  “We shall succeed!” And he caught him in his arms.  “For the Name manifests the essential attributes of the Being it describes, and in uttering it we shall know mystical union with it....  We shall be as Gods!”