t should the
clergyman approve him he would not leave. Yet his intimate relations now
with Miriam, instead of making it easier for him to learn the facts, made
it on the other hand more difficult. For he could not, of course, make
use of her affection to learn secrets that Mr. Skale did not yet wish him
to know. And, further, he had no desire to be disloyal either to him.
None the less he was sorely tempted to ask her what the final experiment
was, and what the 'empty' rooms contained. And most of all what the great
name was they were finally to utter by means of the human chord.

The emotions playing about him at this time, however, were too
complicated and too violent to enable him to form a proper judgment of
the whole affair. It seems, indeed, that this calmer adjudication never
came to him at all, for even to this day the mere mention of the
clergyman's name brings to his round cheeks a flush of that enthusiasm
and wonder which are the enemies of all sober discrimination. Skale still
remains the great battering force of his life that carried him off his
feet towards the stars, and sent his imagination with wings of fire
tearing through the Unknown to a goal that once attained should make them
all four as gods.

Chapter VII

I

And thus the affair moved nearer to its close. The theory and practice of
molding form by means of sound was the next bang at his mind--delivered
in the clergyman's most convincing manner, and, in view of the proofs
that soon followed, an experience that seemed to dislocate the very
foundations of his visible world, deemed hitherto secure enough at least
to stand on.

Had it all consisted merely of talk on Mr. Skale's part the secretary
would have known better what to think. It was the interludes of practical
proof that sent his judgment so awry. These definite, sensible results,
sandwiched in between all the visionary explanation, left him utterly at
sea. He could not reconcile them altogether with hypnotism. He could
only, as an ordinary man, already with a bias in the mystical direction,
come to the one conclusion that this overwhelming and hierophantic man
was actually in touch with cisterns of force so terrific as to be
dangerous to what he had hitherto understood to be--life. It was easy
enough for the clergyman, in his optimistic enthusiasm, to talk about
their leading to a larger life. But what if the experiment failed, and
these colossal powers ran amok upon the world--