Then, with equal swiftness, it passed. His present surroundings came
back. He dropped with a dizzy rush from awful spaces ... and was aware
that he was merely--standing on the black, woolly mat before the fire
watching the movements of his new employer, that his pumps were bright
and pointed, his head just level with a dark marble mantelpiece. Dazed,
and a trifle breathless he felt; and at the back of his disordered mind
stirred a schoolboy's memory that the Pythagoreans believed the
universe to have been called out of chaos by Sound, Number, and
Harmony--or something to that effect.... But these huge, fugitive
thoughts that tore through him refused to be seized and dealt with. He
staggered a little, mentally; then, with a prodigious effort, controlled
himself--and watched.


III

Mr. Skale, he saw, had fastened the little sheet of glass by its four
corners to silken strings hanging from the ceiling. The glass plate hung,
motionless and horizontal, in the air with its freight of sand. For
several minutes the clergyman played a series of beautiful modulations in
double-stopping upon the violin. In these the dominating influence was E
flat. Spinrobin was not musical enough to describe it more accurately
than this. Only, with greater skill than he knows, he mentions how Skale
drew out of that fiddle the peculiarly intimate and searching tones by
which strings can reach the spiritual center of a man and make him
respond to delicate vibrations of thoughts beyond his normal gamut....

Spinrobin, listening, understood that he was a greater man than he
knew....