continue the subject, he said quietly--

"It was a flourishing school in those days, of course. Afterwards, I
have heard--" He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the odd look--it
almost seemed a look of alarm--came back into his eyes. The sentence
remained unfinished.

Something in the tone of the man seemed to his listener uncalled for--in
a sense reproachful, singular. Harris bridled in spite of himself.

"It has changed?" he asked. "I can hardly believe--"

"You have not heard, then?" observed the priest gently, making a gesture
as though to cross himself, yet not actually completing it. "You have
not heard what happened there before it was abandoned--?"

It was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and
overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest
seemed to him so offensive--so disproportionately offensive--that he
hardly noticed the concluding sentence. He recalled the old bitterness
and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper.

"Nonsense," he interrupted with a forced laugh, "_Unsinn_! You must
forgive me, sir, for contradicting you. But I was a pupil there myself.
I was at school there. There was no place like it. I cannot believe that
anything serious could have happened to--to take away its character. The
devotion of the Brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere--"

He broke off suddenly, realising that his voice had been raised unduly
and that the man at the far end of the table might understand German;