hough temporarily submerged human passion of his love for the girl.
Miriam's sudden action revealed the truth to him better than any
argument. In a flash he realized that her choice was made, and that she
was in entire and final revolt against the whole elaborate experiment and
all that it involved. The risk of losing her Spinny, or finding him
changed in some condition of redemption where he would no longer be the
little human thing she so dearly loved, had helped her to this final,
swift conclusion.

With her hand tight over his lips, and her face of white decision before
him, he understood. She called him with those big grey eyes to the sweet
and common uses of life, instead of to the heights of some audacious
heaven where they might be as gods with Philip Skale. She clung to
humanity. And Spinrobin, seeing her at last with spiritual eyes fully
opened, knew finally that she was right.

"But oh," he always cries, "in that moment I knew the most terrible
choice I have ever had to make, for it was not a choice between life and
death, but a choice between two lives, each of infinite promised wonder.
And what do you think it was that decided me, and made me choose the
wholesome, humble life with little Miriam in preference to the grandeur
of Skale's vast dream? What _do_ you think?" And his face always turns
pink and then flame-colored as he asks it, hesitating absurdly before
giving the answer. "I'll tell you, because you'd never guess in this
world." And then he lowers his voice and says, "It was the delicious
little sweet perfume of her fingers as she held them over my lips....!"

That delicate, faint smell was the symbol of human happiness, and
through all the whirlwind of sound and color about him, it somehow
managed to convey its poignant, searching message of the girl's utter
love straight into his heart. Thus curiously out of proportion and
insignificant, indeed, are sometimes the decisive details that in
moments of overwhelming experience turn the course of life's river this
way or that....

With a single wild cry in his soul that found no audible expression, he
gave up the unequal struggle. He turned, and with Miriam by his side,
flew down the corridor from the advent of the Immensity that was upon
them--from the approach of the escaping Letters.

VI

How Spinrobin found his way out of that sound-stricken house remains an
unsolved mystery. He never understood it himself; he remembers only that
when they