then shook the proffered hand without another word. And so they
separated and went to bed, for it was long past midnight.

Chapter III

I

In his bedroom, though excitement banished sleep in spite of the lateness
of the hour, he was too exhausted to make any effective attempt to reduce
the confusion of his mind to order. For the first time in his life the
diary-page for the day remained blank. For a long time he sat before it
with his pencil--then sighed and put it away. A volume he might have
written, but not a page, much less a line or two. And though it was but
eight hours since he had made the acquaintance of the Rev. Philip Skale,
it seemed to him more like eight days.

Moreover, all that he had heard and seen, fantastic and strained as he
felt it to be, possibly even the product of religious mania, was
nevertheless profoundly disquieting, for mixed up with it somewhere or
other was--truth. Mr. Skale _had_ made a discovery--a giant one; it was
not all merely talk and hypnotism, the glamour of words. His great
Experiment would prove to be real and terrible. He _had_ discovered
certain uses of sound, occult yet scientific, and if he, Spinrobin,
elected to stay on, he would be obliged to play his part in the
denouement. And this thought from the very beginning appalled while it
fascinated him. It filled him with a kind of horrible amazement. For the
object the clergyman sought, though not yet disclosed, already cast its
monstrous shadow across his path. He somehow discerned that it would deal
directly with knowledge the saner judgment of a commonplace world had
always deemed undesirable, unlawful, unsafe, dangerous to the souls that
dared attempt it, failure involving a pitiless and terrible Nemesis.

He lay in bed watching the play of the firelight upon the high ceiling,
and thinking in confused fashion of the huge clergyman with his
thundering voice, his great lambent eyes and his seductive gentleness; of
his singular speculations and his hints, half menacing, half splendid, of
things to come. Then he thought of the housekeeper with her deafness and
her withered arm, and that white peace about her face; and, lastly, of
Miriam, soft, pale beneath her dark skin, her gem-like eyes ever finding
his own, and of the intimate personal relations so swiftly established
between them....

It was, indeed, a singular household thus buried away in the heart of
these lonely mountains. The stately old mansion was just