world. It was like stepping back, not thirty years, but three hundred.

There were only two others besides himself at supper. One of them, a
bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and
Harris kept out of his way because he was English. He feared he might be
in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would
perhaps talk on the subject. The other traveller, however, was a
Catholic priest. He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet
so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of "the
cloth" that recalled his memory of the old antagonism. Harris mentioned
by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the
priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression
of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him. He ascribed it to his
difference of belief.

"Yes," went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was
so full, "and it was a curious experience for an English boy to be
dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners. I well remember the
loneliness and intolerable Heimweh of it at first." His German was very
fluent.

The priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and
smiled. It was a nice face. He explained quietly that he did not belong
here, but was making a tour of the parishes of Wurttemberg and Baden.

"It was a strict life," added Harris. "We English, I remember, used to
call it _Gefängnisleben_--prison life!"

The face of the other, for some unaccountable reason, darkened. After a
slight pause, and more by way of politeness than because he wished to