pinrobin then became aware that from his moving
lips, doll-like though bearded, his voice was issuing with an
ever-growing volume of sound and power.

Vibrations of swiftly-increasing depth and wave-length were spreading
through the air about him, filling the room from floor to ceiling. What
the syllables actually uttered may have been he was too dazed to realize,
for no degree of concentration was possible to his mind at all; he only
knew that, before his smarting eyes, with this rising of the voice to its
old dominant inflexion, the figure of Mr. Philip Skale grew likewise,
indescribably; swelled, rose, spread upwards and outwards, but with the
parts ever passing slowly in consistent inter-relation, from minute to
minute. He became, always in perfect proportion, magnified and extended.
The growing form, moreover, kept pace exactly, and most beautifully, with
the increasing tide of sonorous vibration that flooded himself, its
utterer and the whole room.

Spinrobin, it seems, had just sufficient self-control left to realize
that this sound was similar in quality to that which had first awakened
him and caused the outlines of the furniture to alter, when the sight of
Mr. Skale's form changing thus terribly before his eyes, and within the
touch of his very hand, became too much for him altogether....

What precisely happened he never knew. The sounds first enveloped him,
then drove him backwards with a sense of immense applied resistance. He
collapsed upon the sofa a few feet behind him, as though irresistibly
pushed. The power that impelled him charged vehemently through the little
room till it seemed the walls must burst asunder to give it scope, while
the sounds rose to such a volume that he figured himself drowned and
overpowered by their mighty vibrations as by the storm swells of the
Atlantic. Before he lost them as sound he seems thus to have been aware
of them as moving waves of air.... The next thing he took in was that
amid the waste of silence that now followed his inability to hear, the
figure of Philip Skale towered aloft towards the ceiling, till it seemed
positively to occupy all the available space in the room about him.

Had he dropped upon the floor instead of upon the sofa it is probable
that at this point Spinrobin would have lost consciousness, at any rate
for a period; but that sofa, which luckily for his bones was so close
behind, galvanized him sharply back into some measure of self-control
agai