And as the music filled the air his mind began to clear. Like a lifted
veil there rose up something that had hitherto obscured his vision. The
words of the priest at the railway inn flashed across his brain
unbidden: "You will find it different." And also, though why he could
not tell, he saw mentally the strong, rather wonderful eyes of that
other guest at the supper-table, the man who had overheard his
conversation, and had later got into earnest talk with the priest. He
took out his watch and stole a glance at it. Two hours had slipped by.
It was already eleven o'clock.

Schliemann, meanwhile, utterly absorbed in his music, was playing a
solemn measure. The piano sang marvellously. The power of a great
conviction, the simplicity of great art, the vital spiritual message of
a soul that had found itself--all this, and more, were in the chords,
and yet somehow the music was what can only be described as
impure--atrociously and diabolically impure. And the piece itself,
although Harris did not recognise it as anything familiar, was surely
the music of a Mass--huge, majestic, sombre? It stalked through the
smoky room with slow power, like the passage of something that was
mighty, yet profoundly intimate, and as it went there stirred into each
and every face about him the signature of the enormous forces of which
it was the audible symbol. The countenances round him turned sinister,
but not idly, negatively sinister: they grew dark with purpose. He
suddenly recalled the face of Bruder Kalkmann in the corridor earlier in
the evening. The motives of their secret souls rose to the eyes, and
mouths, and foreheads, and hung there for all to see like the black
banners of an assembly of ill-starred and fallen creatures. Demons--was
the horrible word that flashed through his brain like a sheet of fire.

When this sudden discovery leaped out upon him, for a moment he lost his