Then the idea grew in his mind that the clergyman was obsessed by some perverted spiritual force, some “Devil” who deceived him, and that the name he sought to pronounce was after all not good—­not God.  His thoughts, fears, hopes, all became hopelessly entangled, through them one thing alone holding clear and steady—­the passionate desire to keep Miriam as she was now, and to be with her forever.  His mind played tricks with him too.  Day and night the house echoed with new sounds; the very walls grew resonant; the entire building, buried away among these desolate hills, trembled as though he were imprisoned within the belly of some monstrous and gigantic fiddle.

Mr. Skale, too, began to change, it seemed.  While physically he increased, as it were, with the power of his burning enthusiasm, his beard longer and more ragged, his eyes more luminous, and his voice shaking through the atmosphere almost like wind, his personality, in some curious fashion, seemed at the same time to retire and become oddly tinged with a certain remoteness from reality.  Spinrobin once or twice caught himself wondering if he were not after all some legendary or pagan figure, some mighty character of dream or story, and that presently he, Spinrobin, would awake and write down the most wonderful vision the world had ever known.  His imagination, it will be seen, was affected in more ways than one....

With a tremendous earnestness the clergyman went about the building, down the long dark corridors and across the halls, his long soft strides took him swiftly everywhere; his mere presence charged with some potent force that betrayed itself in the fire of his eyes and the flush of his cheeks.

Spinrobin thought of him as some daring blasphemer, knocking at a door in the sky.  The sound of that knocking ran all about the universe.  And when the door opened, the heavens would roll back like an enormous, flat curtain....

“Any moment almost,” Skale whispered to him, smiling, “the day may be upon us.  Keep yourself ready—­and—­in tune.”

And Spinrobin, expecting a thunderclap in his sleep, but ever plucky, answered in his high-pitched voice, “I’m ready, Mr. Philip Skale, I’m ready!  I’m game too!” when, truthfully speaking, perhaps, he was neither one nor other.

He would start up from sleep in the nighttime at the least sound, and the roar of the December gales about the house became voices of portent that conveyed far more than the mere rushing of inarticulate winds....

“When the hour comes—­and it is close at hand—­we shall not fail to know it,” said Skale, pallid with excitement.  “The Letters will be out upon us.  They will live!  But with an intense degree of exuberant life far beyond what we know as life—­we, in our puny, sense-limited bodies!” And the scorn in his voice came from the center of his heart.  “For what we hear as sound is only a section,” he cried, “only a section of sound-vibrations—­as they exist.”