“Not ‘as it were,’” boomed the other, “You do hear it.  After which the next step is to utter it, and so absorb its force into your own being by synchronous vibration—­union mystical and actual.  Only, you must be sure you utter it correctly.  To pronounce incorrectly is to call it incompletely into life and form—­to distort and injure it, and yourself with it.  To make it untrue—­a lie.”

They were standing in the dusk by the library window, watching the veil of night that slowly covered the hills.  The flying horizons of the moors had slipped away into the darkness.

The stars were whispering together their thoughts of flame and speed.  At the back of the room sat Miriam among the shadows, like some melody hovering in a musician’s mind till he should call her forth.  It was close upon the tea hour.  Behind them Mrs. Mawle was busying herself with lamps and fire.  Mr. Skale, turning at the sound of the housekeeper, motioned to the secretary to approach, then stooped down and spoke low in his ear: 

“With many names I had great difficulty,” he whispered.  “With hers, for instance,” indicating the housekeeper behind them.  “It took me five years’ continuous research to establish her general voice-outline, and even then I at first only derived a portion of her name.  And in uttering it I made such errors of omission and pronunciation that her physical form suffered, and she emerged from the ordeal in disorder.  You have, of course, noticed her disabilities....  But, later, though only in stammering fashion, I called upon her all complete, and she has since known a serene blessedness and a sense of her great value in the music of life that she never knew before.”  His face lit up as he spoke of it.  “For in that moment she found herself.  She heard her true name, God’s creative sound, thunder through her being.”

Spinrobin, feeling the clergyman’s forces pouring through him like a tide at such close proximity, bowed his head.  His lips were too dry to frame words.  He was thinking of the possible effects upon his own soul and body when his name too should be “uttered.”  He remembered the withered arm and the deafness.  He thought, too, of that slender, ghostly figure that haunted the house with its soft movements and tender singing.  Lastly, he remembered his strange conviction that somewhere in the great building, possibly in his own corridor, there were other occupants, other life, Beings of unearthly scale waiting the given moment to appear, summoned by utterance.

“And you will understand now why it is I want a man of high courage to help me,” Skale resumed in a louder tone, standing sharply upright; “a man careless of physical existence, and with a faith wholly beyond the things of this world!”

“I do indeed,” he managed to reply aloud, while in his thoughts he was saying, “I will, I must see it through.  I won’t give in!” With all his might he resisted the invading tide of terror.  Even if sad results came later, it was something to have been sacrificed in so big a conception.