ime a little uncomfortable by the
excess of their admiration. After all, it was such a very small thing to
do, this sentimental journey.

The time passed along quickly; the coffee was excellent, the cigars soft
and of the nutty flavour he loved. At length, fearing to outstay his
welcome, he rose reluctantly to take his leave. But the others would not
hear of it. It was not often a former pupil returned to visit them in
this simple, unaffected way. The night was young. If necessary they
could even find him a corner in the great _Schlafzimmer_ upstairs. He
was easily persuaded to stay a little longer. Somehow he had become the
centre of the little party. He felt pleased, flattered, honoured.

"And perhaps Bruder Schliemann will play something for us--now."

It was Kalkmann speaking, and Harris started visibly as he heard the
name, and saw the black-haired man by the piano turn with a smile. For
Schliemann was the name of his old music director, who was dead. Could
this be his son? They were so exactly alike.

"If Bruder Meyer has not put his Amati to bed, I will accompany him,"
said the musician suggestively, looking across at a man whom Harris had
not yet noticed, and who, he now saw, was the very image of a former
master of that name.

Meyer rose and excused himself with a little bow, and the Englishman
quickly observed that he had a peculiar gesture as though his neck had a
false join on to the body just below the collar and feared it might
break. Meyer of old had this trick of movement. He remembered how the
boys used to copy it.

He glanced sharply from face to face, feeling as though some silent,
unseen process were changing everything about him. All the faces seemed
oddly familiar. Pagel, the Brother he had been talking with, was of
course the image of Pagel, his former room-master, and Kalkmann, he now
realised for the first time, was the very twin of another master whose
name he had quite forgotten, but whom he used to dislike intensely in
the old days. And, through the smoke, peering at him from the corners of
the room, he saw that all the Brothers about him had the faces he had
known and lived with long ago--Roest, Fluheim, Meinert, Rigel, Gysin.

He stared hard, suddenly grown more alert, and everywhere saw, or
fancied he saw, strange likenesses, ghostly resemblances,--more, the
identical faces of years ago. There was something queer about it all,
something not quite right, something that made him feel