we come out." And while the secretary
struggled among the folds of this cassock-like garment, that was several
feet too long for his diminutive stature, the clergyman added, still with
a gravity and earnestness that impressed the imagination beyond all reach
of the ludicrous:

"For sound and color are intimately associated, and there are
combinations of the two that can throw the spiritual body into a
condition of safe receptivity, without which we should be deaf and blind
even in the great Presences themselves."

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
r