essed 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 clo