soner. Hands rose and sank about
him in the darkness, and he felt that he was being draped in other
garments than his own; a circlet of ice seemed to run about his head,
while round the waist, enclosing the fastened arms, he felt a girdle
tightly drawn. At last, about his very throat, there ran a soft and
silken touch which, better than if there had been full light, and a
mirror held to his face, he understood to be the cord of sacrifice--and
of death.

At this moment the Brothers, still prostrate upon the floor, began again
their mournful, yet impassioned chanting, and as they did so a strange
thing happened. For, apparently without moving or altering its position,
the huge Figure seemed, at once and suddenly, to be inside the room,
almost beside him, and to fill the space around him to the exclusion of
all else.

He was now beyond all ordinary sensations of fear, only a drab feeling
as of death--the death of the soul--stirred in his heart. His thoughts
no longer even beat vainly for escape. The end was near, and he knew it.

The dreadfully chanting voices rose about him in a wave: "We worship! We
adore! We offer!" The sounds filled his ears and hammered, almost
meaningless, upon his brain.

Then the majestic grey face turned slowly downwards upon him, and his
very soul passed outwards and seemed to become absorbed in the sea of
those anguished eyes. At the same moment a dozen hands forced him to his
knees, and in the air before him he saw the arm of Kalkmann upraised,
and felt the pressure about his throat grow strong.

It was in this awful moment, when he had given up all hope, and the help
of gods or men seemed beyond question, that a strange thing happened.
For before his fading and terrified vision there slid, as in a dream of
light,--yet without apparent rhyme or reason--wholly unbidden and
unexplained,--the face of that other man at the supper table of the
railway inn. And the sight, even mentally, of that strong, wholesome,
vigorous English face, inspired him suddenly with a new courage.

It was but a flash of fading vision before he sank into a dark and
terrible death, yet, in some inexplicable way, the sight of that face
stirred in him unconquerable hope and the certainty of deliverance. It
was a face of power, a face, he now realised, of simple goodness such as
might have been seen by men of old on the shores of Galilee; a face, by
heaven, that could conquer even the devils of outer space.

And, in h