is despair and abandonment, he called upon it, and called with
no uncertain accents. He found his voice in this overwhelming moment to
some purpose; though the words he actually used, and whether they were
in German or English, he could never remember. Their effect,
nevertheless, was instantaneous. The Brothers understood, and that grey
Figure of evil understood.

For a second the confusion was terrific. There came a great shattering
sound. It seemed that the very earth trembled. But all Harris remembered
afterwards was that voices rose about him in the clamour of terrified
alarm--

"A man of power is among us! A man of God!"

The vast sound was repeated--the rushing through space as of huge
projectiles--and he sank to the floor of the room, unconscious. The
entire scene had vanished, vanished like smoke over the roof of a
cottage when the wind blows.

And, by his side, sat down a slight un-German figure,--the figure of the
stranger at the inn,--the man who had the "rather wonderful eyes."

* * * * *

When Harris came to himself he felt cold. He was lying under the open
sky, and the cool air of field and forest was blowing upon his face. He
sat up and looked about him. The memory of the late scene was still
horribly in his mind, but no vestige of it remained. No walls or ceiling
enclosed him; he was no longer in a room at all. There were no lamps
turned low, no cigar smoke, no black forms of sinister worshippers, no
tremendous grey Figure hovering beyond the windows.

Open space was about him, and he was lying on a pile of bricks and
mortar, his clothes soaked with dew, and the kind stars shining brightly
overhead. He was lying, bruised and shaken, among the heaped-up debris
of a ruined building.

He stood up and stared about him. There, in the shadowy distance, lay
the surrounding forest, and here, close at hand, stood the outline of
the village buildings. But, underfoot, beyond question, lay nothing but
the broken heaps of stones that betokened a building long since crumbled
to dust. Then he saw that the stones were blackened, and that great
wooden beams, half burnt, half rotten, made lines through the general
debris. He stood, then, among the ruins of a burnt and shattered
building, the weeds and nettles proving conclusively that it had lain
thus for many years.

The moon had already set behind the encircling forest, but the stars
that spangled the heavens threw enough light