mplete," he cried incoherently in reply, seizing the
truth of her thought, and setting her upon the ground; "it includes even
this. It is a part of ... the Name ... correctly uttered ... for it is
true and pure."

He heard her calling his inner name, and he began forthwith to call her
own as they stood there clinging to one another, mingling arms and hair
and lips in such a tumult of passion that it seemed as though all this
outer convulsion of the world was a small matter compared to the
commotion in their own hearts, revolutionized by the influx of a divine
love that sought to melt them into a single being.

And as they looked down into the valley at their feet, too bewildered to
resist these mighty forces that stole the breath from their throats and
the strength from their muscles, they saw with a clearness as of day that
the House of Awe in which their love had wakened and matured was passing
away and being utterly consumed.

In a flame of white fire, tongued and sheeted, streaked with gulfs of
black, and most terribly roaring, it rose with a prodigious crackling of
walls and roof towards the sky. Volumes of colored smoke, like hills
moving, went with it; and with it, too, went the forms--the substance of
their forms, at least, of their "sounds" released--of Philip Skale, Mrs.
Mawle, and all the paraphernalia of gongs, drapery, wires, sheeted walls,
sand-patterns, and the preparations of a quarter of a century of labor
and audacious research. For nothing could possibly survive in such a
furnace. The heat of it struck their faces where they stood even here
high upon the hills, and the currents of rising wind blew the girl's
tresses across his eyes and moved his own feathery hair upon his head.
The notes of those leaping flames were like thunder.

"Watch now!" cried Miriam, though he divined the meaning from the gesture
of her free hand rather than actually heard the words.

And, leaning their trembling bodies against a great boulder behind
them, they then saw in the midst of the conflagration, or hovering
dimly above it rather, the vast outlines of the captured sounds--the
Letters--escaping back again into the womb of eternal silence from which
they had been with such appalling courage evoked. In forms of dazzling
blackness they passed upwards in their chariots of flame, yet at the same
time passed _inwards_ in some amazing kind of spiral motion upon their
own axes, vanishing away with incredible swiftness and be