red, glancing up at the other over his teacup, but Spinrobin was
crunching his toast too noisily to notice the meaning of the words fully.

II

The Stage Manager who stands behind all the scenes of life, both great
and small, had prepared the scene well for what was to follow. The
sentences about the world of inaudible sound had dropped the right kind
of suggestion into the secretary's heart. His mind still whirred with a
litter of half-digested sentences and ideas, however, and he was vividly
haunted by the actuality of truth behind them all. His whole inner being
at that moment cried "Hark!" through a hush of expectant wonder.

There they sat at tea, this singular group of human beings: Mr. Skale,
bigger than ever in his loose housesuit of black, swallowing his liquid
with noisy gulps; Spinrobin, nibbling slippery morsels of hot toast, on
the edge of his chair; Miriam, quiet and mysterious, in her corner; and
Mrs. Mawle, sedate, respectful in cap and apron, presiding over the
teapot, the whole scene cozily lit by lamp and fire--when this remarkable
new thing happened. Spinrobin declares always that it came upon him like
a drowning wave, frightening him not with any idea of injury to himself,
but with a dreadful sense of being lost and shelterless among the
immensities of a transcendent new world. Something passed into the room
that made his soul shake and flutter at the center.

His attention was first roused by a sound that he took, perhaps, to be
the wind coming down from the hills in those draughts and gusts he
sometimes heard, only to his imagination now it was a peopled wind
crying round the walls, behind whose voice he detected the great fluid
form of it--running and colored. But, with the noise, a terror that was
no ordinary terror invaded the recesses of his soul. It was the fear of
the Unknown, dreadfully multiplied.

He glanced up quickly from his teacup, and chancing to meet Miriam's eye,
he saw that she was smiling as she watched him. This sound, then, had
some special significance. At the same instant he perceived that it was
not outside but in the room, close beside him, that Mr. Skale, in fact,
was talking to the deaf housekeeper in a low and carefully modulated
tone--a tone she could not possibly have heard, however. Then he
discovered that the clergyman was not speaking actually, but repeating
her name. He was intoning it. It grew into a kind of singing chant, an
incantation.

"Sarah Mawle ...