"And the hour of midnight draws near," added Bruder Kalkmann with a
charming smile, but in a voice that sounded to the Englishman like the
grating of iron hinges.

Their German seemed to him more and more difficult to understand. He
noted that they called him "Bruder" too, classing him as one of
themselves.

And then suddenly he had a flash of keener perception, and realised with
a creeping of his flesh that he had all along misinterpreted--grossly
misinterpreted all they had been saying. They had talked about the
beauty of the place, its isolation and remoteness from the world, its
peculiar fitness for certain kinds of spiritual development and
worship--yet hardly, he now grasped, in the sense in which he had taken
the words. They had meant something different. Their spiritual powers,
their desire for loneliness, their passion for worship, were not the
powers, the solitude, or the worship that _he_ meant and understood. He
was playing a part in some horrible masquerade; he was among men who
cloaked their lives with religion in order to follow their real purposes
unseen of men.

What did it all mean? How had he blundered into so equivocal a
situation? Had he blundered into it at all? Had he not rather been led
into it, deliberately led? His thoughts grew dreadfully confused, and
his confidence in himself began to fade. And why, he suddenly thought
again, were they so impressed by the mere fact of his coming to revisit
his old school? What was it they so admired and wondered at in his
simple act? Why did they set such store upon his having the courage to
come, to "give himself so freely," "unconditionally" as one of them had