together,
and he heard her voice emerge alone. With a little rush like that of a
singing flame, it dropped down on to the syllables of his name--his ugly
and ridiculous outer and ordinary name:

"ROBERTSPINROBIN ... ROBERTSPINROBIN ..." he heard; and the sound flowed
and poured about his ears like the murmur of a stream through summer
fields. And, almost immediately, with it there came over him a sense of
profound peace and security. Very soon, too, he lost the sound
itself--did not hear it, as sound, for it grew too vast and enveloping.
The sight of Miriam's face also he lost. He grew too close to her to see
her, as object. Both hearing and sight merged into something more
intimate than either. He and the girl were together--one consciousness,
yet two aspects of that one consciousness.

They were two notes singing together in the same chord, and he had lost
his little personality, only to find it again, increased and redeemed, in
an existence that was larger.

It seemed to Spinrobin--for there is only his limited phraseology to draw
from--that the incantation of her singing tones inserted itself between
the particles of his flesh and separated them, ran with his blood,
covered his skin with velvet, flowed and purred in the very texture of
his mind and thoughts. Something in him swam, melted, fused. His inner
kingdom became most gloriously extended....

His soul loosened, then began to soar, while something at the heart of
him that had hitherto been congealed now turned fluid and alive. He was
light as air, swift as fire. His thoughts, too, underwent a change: rose
and fell with the larger rhythm of new life as the sound played upon
them, somewhat as wind may rouse the leaves of a tree, or call upon the
surface of a deep sea to follow it in waves. Terror was nowhere in his
sensations; but wonder, beauty and delight ran calling to one another
from one wave to the next, as this tide of sound moved potently in the
depths of his awakening higher consciousness. The little reactions of
ordinary life spun away from him into nothingness as he listened to a
volume of sound that was oceanic in power and of an infinite splendor:
the creative sound by which God first called him into form and
being--the true inner name of his soul.

...Yet he no longer consciously listened... no longer, perhaps,
consciously heard. The name of the soul can sound only in the soul, where
no speech is, nor any need for such stammering symbols. Spi