that they had been
running for days. They stood still and looked about them.

"You shall never regret, never, never," Miriam whispered quickly. "I can
make you happier than all this ever could," and she waved her arm towards
the house below. "And you know it, my little Master."

But before he could reply, or do more than place an arm about her waist
to support her, something came to pass that communicated its message to
their souls with an incalculable certainty neither could explain.
Perhaps it was that distance enabled them to distinguish between the
sounds more clearly, or perhaps their beings were still so intimately
connected with Skale that some psychic warning traveled up to them across
the night; but at any rate there then came about this sharp and sudden
change in the quality of the sound-tempest round them that proclaimed the
arrival of an exceedingly dramatic moment. The nature of the rushing,
flying vibrations underwent alteration. And, looking one another in the
eyes, they realized what it meant.

"He's beginning ..." faltered Spinrobin in some skeleton of a voice.
"Skale has begun to _utter_...!" He said it beneath his breath.

Down in the cellar of that awful house the giant clergyman, alone and
undismayed, had begun to call the opening vibration of the living chord
which was to gather in this torrent of escaping Letters and unite them in
temporary safety in the crypts of the prepared vault. For the first time
in eighteen hundred years the initial sound of the "Name that rusheth
through the universe"--the first sound of its opening syllable, that
is--was about to thunder its incalculable message over the earth.

Crouching close against each other they stood there on the edge of the
woods, the night darkly smothering about them, the bare, open hills lying
beyond in the still sky, waiting for the long-apprehended climax--the
utterance of the first great syllable.

"It will make him ... as God," crashed the thought through Spinrobin's
brain as he experienced the pangs of the fiercest remorse he had ever
known. "Even without our two notes the power will be sublime...!"

But, through Miriam's swiftly-beating heart, as she pressed closer and
closer: "I know your true name ... and you are mine. What else in heaven
or earth can ever matter...?"

Chapter XIV

I

Skale had indeed begun to utter. And to these two bewildered children
standing there alone with their love upon the mountain, it seeme