eart
that alone held him to sanity and prevented--as it seemed to him in that
appalling moment--the dissolution of his very being and hers.

For Philip Skale had somewhere _uttered falsely_.

A darting zigzag crack, as of lightning, ran over the giant fabric of
vibrations that covered the altering world as with a flood ... and sounds
that no man may hear and not die leaped awfully into being. The
suddenness and immensity of the catastrophe blinded these two listening
children-souls. Awe and terror usurped all other feelings ... but one.
Their love, being born of the spirit, held supreme, insulating them, so
to speak, from all invading disasters.

Philip Skale had made a mistake in the pronunciation of the Name.

The results were dreadful and immediate, and from all the surface of the
wakening world rose anguished voices. Spinrobin started up, lifting
Miriam into his arms. He spun dizzily for a moment between boulders and
trees, giving out a great wailing cry, unearthly enough had there been
any to hear it. Then he began to run wildly through the thick darkness.
In his ear--for her head lay close--he heard her dear voice, between the
sobs of collapse, calling his inner name most sweetly; and the sound
summoned to the front all in him that was best and manly.

"My sweet Master, my sweet Master!"

But he did not run far. About him on every side the night lifted as
though it were suddenly day. He saw the summits of the bleak mountains
agleam with the reflection of some great light that rushed upon them from
the valley. All the desolate landscape, hesitating like some hovering
ocean between the old pattern and the new, seemed to hang suspended amid
the desolation of the winter skies. Everything roared. It seemed the
ground shook. The very bones of the woods went shuddering together; the
hills toppled; and overhead, in some incredible depths of space, boomed
sounds as though the heavens split off into fragments and hurled the
constellations about the vault to swell these shattering thunders of a
collapsing world.

The Letters of that terrible and august Name were passing over the face
of the universe--distorted because mispronounced--creative sounds,
disheveled and monstrous, because incompletely and incorrectly uttered.

"Put me down," he heard Miriam cry where she lay smothered in his arms,
"and we can face everything together, and be safe. Our love is bigger
than it all and will protect us...."

"Because it is co