uneasy. He shook
himself, mentally and actually, blowing the smoke from before his eyes
with a long breath, and as he did so he noticed to his dismay that every
one was fixedly staring. They were watching him.

This brought him to his senses. As an Englishman, and a foreigner, he
did not wish to be rude, or to do anything to make himself foolishly
conspicuous and spoil the harmony of the evening. He was a guest, and a
privileged guest at that. Besides, the music had already begun. Bruder
Schliemann's long white fingers were caressing the keys to some purpose.

He subsided into his chair and smoked with half-closed eyes that yet saw
everything.

But the shudder had established itself in his being, and, whether he
would or not, it kept repeating itself. As a town, far up some inland
river, feels the pressure of the distant sea, so he became aware that
mighty forces from somewhere beyond his ken were urging themselves up
against his soul in this smoky little room. He began to feel exceedingly
ill at ease.

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: