ale'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.

"Sarahmawle ... Sarahmawle...." The name continued to pour itself about
him in a steady ripple, neither rising nor falling, and certainly not
audible to those deaf old ears that flanked the vigorous and unwrinkled
face. "Youth" is not the word to describe this appearance of ardent
intensity that flamed out of the form and features of the housekeeper,
for it was something utterly apart from either youth or age. Nor was it
any mere idealization of her worn and crumpled self. It was independent
of physical conditions, as it was independent of the limitations of time
and space; superb as sunshine, simple as the glory that had sometimes
touched his soul of boyhood in sleep--the white fires of an utter
transfiguration.

It was, in a word, as if the name Skale uttered had summoned to the
front, through all disguising barriers of flesh, her true and naked
spirit, that which neither ages nor dies, that which the eyes, when they
rest upon a human countenance, can never see--the Soul itself!

For the first time in his life Spinrobin, abashed and trembling, gazed
upon something in human guise that was genuinely sublime--perfect with a
stainless purity. The mere sight produced in him an exaltation of the
spirit such as he had never before experienced ... swallowing up his
first terror. In his heart of hearts, he declares, he prayed; for this
was the natural expression for an emotion of the volume and intensity
that surged within him....

How long he sat there gazing seems uncertain; perhaps minutes, perhaps
seconds only. The sense of time's passage was temporarily annihilated. It
might well have been a thousand years, for the sight somehow swept him
into eternity.... In that tearoom of Skale's lonely house among the
mountains, the warmth of an earthly fire upon his back, the light of an
earthly oil-lamp in his eyes, holding buttered toast in exceedingly
earthly fingers, he sat face to face with something that yet was not of
this earth, something majestic, spiritual and eternal ... visible
evidence of transfiguration and of "earth growing heaven...."

* * * * *

It was, of course, stupid and clumsy of Spinrobin to drop his teacup and
let it smash noisily against the leg of the tab