ver spread silently between the earth
and stars. He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them
whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light. The
mountain air was indescribably sweet. The road shone like the foam of a
river through the gloom. White moths flitted here and there like silent
thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the
forest caverns across the years.

Then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both
sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing.

He walked faster. There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted
with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the
fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church
next to the Gasthof der Bruedergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising
into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school
building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight,
standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more
than a quarter of a century.

He passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close
beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him
prisoner for two years--two unbroken years of discipline and
homesickness. Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the
most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it
was here he had first begun to live and learn values. Not a single
footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there
through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the
school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces
crowded to the windows to greet him--closed windows that really
reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.

This, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the
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
t