roller, retreated, then came on again with a second
gigantic crest. The rhythm of the huge sound had caught him. The life in
him expanded awfully, rose to far summits, dropped to utter depths. A
sense of glowing exaltation swept through him as though wings of power
lifted his heart with enormous ascendancy. The biggest passions of his
soul stirred--the sweetest dreams, yearnings, aspirations he had ever
known were blown to fever heat. Above all, his passion for Miriam waxed
tumultuous and possessed him.

Mr. Skale dropped his fruit knife and uttered a cry, but a cry of so
peculiar a character that Spinrobin thought for a moment he was about to
burst into song. At the same instant he stood up, and his chair fell
backwards with a crash upon the floor. Spinrobin stood up too. He asserts
always that he was lifted up. He recognized no conscious effort of his
own. It was at this point, moreover, that Miriam, pale as linen, yet
uttering no sound and fully mistress of herself, left her side of the
table and ran round swiftly to the protection of her lover.

She came close up. "Spinny," she said, "it's come!"

Thus all three were standing round that dinner table on the verge of some
very vigorous action not yet disclosed, as people, vigilant and alert,
stand up at a cry of fire, when the door from the passage opened noisily
and in rushed Mrs. Mawle, surrounded by an atmosphere of light such as
might come from a furnace door suddenly thrown wide in some dark foundry.
Only the light was not steady; it was whirling.

She ran across the floor as though dancing--the dancing of a
child--propelled, it seemed, by an irresistible drive of force behind;
while with her through the opened door came a roaring volume of sound
that was terrible as Niagara let loose, yet at the same time exquisitely
sweet, as birds or children singing. Upon these two incongruous qualities
Spinrobin always insists.

"The deaf shall hear--!" came sharply from the clergyman's lips, the
sentence uncompleted, for the housekeeper cut him short.

"They're out!" she cried with a loud, half-frightened jubilance; "Mr.
Skale's prisoners are bursting their way about the house. And one of
them," she added with a scream of joy and terror mingled, "is in my
throat...!"

If the odd phrase she made use of stuck vividly in Spinrobin's memory,
the appearance she presented impressed him even more. For her face was
shining and alight, radiant as when Skale had called her tru