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He might climb to Skale's impossible Heaven, Skale's outrageous Heaven ... on the wings of this portentous experience, or he might sink back into the stream of wholesome and commonplace life, with a delicious little human love to companion him across the years, the unsoiled love of an embryonic soul that he could train practically from birth.
Skale's form changing thus terribly before his eyes, and within the touch of his very hand, became too much for him altogether.... What precisely happened he never knew. The sounds first enveloped him, then drove him backwards with a sense of immense applied resistance. He collapsed upon the sofa a few feet behind him, as though irresistibly pushed.
Skale's compliments and Mr. Spinrobin is not to hurry himself," he heard her saying, as she put the tray beside the bed and went out of the room. He looked at his watch and saw that it was after ten o'clock. Half an hour later he was dressed and on his way downstairs, conscious only of an overwhelming desire to see Mr. Skale, but to see him in his normal and fatherly aspect again.
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.
It was their introduction absolute to one another, for it was an instant of naked revelation. "Spinrobin...." "Miriam...." ... A great volume of sound suddenly enveloped and caught away the two singing names, and the spell was broken. Miriam dropped her eyes; Spinrobin looked up. It was Mr. Skale's voice upon them with a shout.
And she said things with the simple audacity of a child, ignoring Mr. Skale's presence. It seemed to the secretary as if he had always known her. "I knew just how you would look," she said, without a trace of shyness, "the moment I heard your name. And you got my name very quickly, too?" "Only part of it, at first " "Oh yes; but when you saw me completely you got it all," she interrupted.
Besides, Miriam was involved in it with him. What could he ask better than to risk his insignificant personality in some gigantic, mad attempt to plumb the Unknown, with that slender, little pale-faced Beauty by his side? The wave of Mr. Skale's enthusiasm swept him away deliciously. "And now," he cried, "we'll get your Pattern too.
Skale's portentous visage; but his ears were not so easily denied, and he was positive that he heard a voice that called his name as though it were the opening phrase of some sweet, childhood lullaby.
In this extraordinary new world of Philip Skale's revelation he fairly spun. It was one thing when the protective presence of the clergyman was about him, or when he was sustained by the excitement of enthusiasm, but when he was alone, at his normal level, timid, yet adventurous, the too vivid sense of these new things made him tremble.
So perilously adjusted is the ludicrous to the sublime, that while the secretary wondered dumbly whether the word "housekeeper" might also in Skale's new world connote "angel," he could have laughed aloud, had not the nobility of the spectacle hinted at the same time that he should have wept. For the tears of a positive worship started to his eyes at the sight.
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