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Updated: May 16, 2025
Spinrobin looked from the patterns to his companion's great face bending there beside him. Then he looked back again at the patterns. He could think of nothing quite intelligible to say. He noticed more clearly every minute that these dainty shapes of sand, stellar, spiral, and floral, stood to one another in certain definite proportions, in a rising and calculated ratio of singular beauty.
The clergyman's world, whether he himself were mad or sane, was a real world, alive, vibrating, shortly to produce practical results. Spinrobin would have staked his very life upon it.... And, meanwhile, he made love openly under any other conditions, outrageously to Miriam, whose figure of soft beauty moving silently about the house helped to redeem it.
And while Spinrobin still sat there, trembling with the two passions that tore his soul in twain the passion to climb forbidden skies with Skale, and the passion to know sweet human love with Miriam there came thundering into the room no less a personage than the giant clergyman, straight from those haunted rooms.
Skale was moving beside him, and the next minute they were in the narrow vestibule between the doors, hanging up ordinary colored surplices upon ordinary iron nails. Spinrobin stumbled. Skale caught him.
The torrent of sound, now growing louder and louder, so confused him at first, and the dancing patchwork of light and shadow the candle threw so increased his bewilderment, that for some minutes he sought in vain to steady his mind to the point of accurate observation. "God of my Fathers!" cried Spinrobin at last under his breath, and hardly knowing what he said, "if it's not moving!"
Spinrobin, amid all the torrent of words in which he sought later to describe the experience, could only falter out a single comprehensible sentence: "I felt like stammering in intoxication over the first letter of a name I loved loved to the point of ecstasy to the point even of giving up my life for it."
It was very frank, but the secretary did not feel offended. He accepted the explanation as perfectly reasonable. In his mind he knew full well what his choice would be. This was the supreme adventure he had been so long a-seeking. No ordinary obstacle could prevent his accepting it. There came a pause of some length, in which Spinrobin found nothing particular to say.
Spinrobin followed the big dark outline in front of him as best he could, stumbling frequently. With countless little hopping steps he dodged along from point to point, a certain lucky nimbleness in his twinkling feet saving him from many a tumble. "All right behind there?" Mr. Skale would thunder. "All right, thanks, Mr. Skale," he would reply in his thin tenor, "I'm coming." "Come along, then!"
They crossed the hall and went down the long stone passage beyond the dining room till they reached a swinging baize door, and so came to the dark stairs that plunged below ground. Skale strode first, Spinrobin following with beating heart; he held Miriam by the hand; his steps, though firm enough, made him think of his efforts as a boy when treading water for solid ground out of his depth.
It grew into a kind of singing chant, an incantation. "Sarah Mawle ... Sarah Mawle ... Sarah Mawle ..." ran through the room like water. And, in Skale's mouth, it sounded as his own name had sounded different. It became in some significant way thus Spinrobin expresses it always stately, important, nay, even august. It became real.
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