"WANTED, by Retired Clergyman, Secretarial Assistant with courage and imagination. Tenor voice and some knowledge of Hebrew essential; single; unworldly. Apply Philip Skale." Robert Spinrobin needed the work, and he took the dare -- swallowing the bait whole. "Unworldly" put the match, and he flamed up. He possessed, it seemed, the other necessary qualifications; for a thin tenor voice, not unmusical, was his, and also a smattering of Hebrew which he had picked up at Cambridge because he liked the fine, high-sounding names of deities and angels to be found in that language. Courage and imagination he lumped in, so to speak, with the rest. It was a dare he lived to regret. By the consequences of that decision had played themselves out, the very whisper of his voice had become a furnace that burned so fiercely that nothing could survive it.