entous import. He did not himself ask it
deliberately. He surprised his sub-consciousness asking it:

"WHAT IS THIS NAME THAT PHILIP SKALE FOREVER SEEKS?"

It was no longer mere curiosity that asked it, but that sense of
responsibility which in all men of principle and character lies at the
root of action and of life. And Spinrobin, for all his little weaknesses,
was a man of character and principle. There came a point when he could no
longer follow blindly where others led, even though the leader were so
grand an individual as Philip Skale. This point is reached at varying
degrees of the moral thermometer, and but for the love that Miriam had
wakened in his heart, it might have taken much longer to send the mercury
of his will so high in so short a time. He now felt responsibility for
two, and in the depths of his queer, confused, little mind stirred the
thought that possibly after all the great adventure he sought was only
the supreme adventure of a very wonderful Love.

He records these two questions at this point, and it is only just to
himself, therefore, to set them down here. To neither was the answer yet
forthcoming.

For some days the routine of this singular household followed its normal
course, the only change being that while the secretary practiced his
Hebrew names and studied the relations between sound, color, form and the
rest, he kept himself a little better in hand, for Love is a mighty
humanizer and holds down the nose upon the grindstone of the wholesome
and practical values of existence. He turned, so to speak, and tried to
face the matter squarely; to see the adventure as a whole; to get all
round it and judge. It seems, however, that he was too much in the thick
of it to get that bird's-eye view which reduces details to the right
proportion. Skale's personality was too close, and flooded him too
violently. Spinrobin remained confused and bewildered; but also
unbelievably happy.

"Coming out all right," he wrote shakily in that gilt-edged diary.
"Beginning to understand why I'm in the world. Am just as important as
anybody else--_really_. Impossible explain more." His entries were
very like telegrams, in which a man attempts to express in a lucid
shorthand all manner of things that the actual words hardly compass.
And life itself is not unlike some mighty telegram that seeks vainly
to express, between the extremes of silence and excess, all that the
soul would say....

"Skale is going too fa