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 his 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.”