world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked
lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the
corners. For a long time he stood and stared. Then, presently, he came
to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in
the windows of the Bruderstube.

He turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then
climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door
with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with
the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon
tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.

Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of
excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building. And the
long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense
of reality that he positively shivered. It was like the magic bell in
the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the
figures from the shadows of the dead. He had never felt so sentimental
in his life. It was like being young again. And, at the same time, he
began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious
importance. He was a big man from the world of strife and action. In
this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut
something of a figure?

"I'll try once more," he thought after a long pause, seizing the iron
bell-rope, and was just about to pull it when a step sounded on the
stone passage within, and the huge door slowly swung open.

A tall man with a rather severe cast of countenance stood facing him in
silence.