There were only two others besides himself at supper.  One of them, a bearded, middle-aged man in tweeds, sat by himself at the far end, and Harris kept out of his way because he was English.  He feared he might be in business, possibly even in the silk business, and that he would perhaps talk on the subject.  The other traveller, however, was a Catholic priest.  He was a little man who ate his salad with a knife, yet so gently that it was almost inoffensive, and it was the sight of “the cloth” that recalled his memory of the old antagonism.  Harris mentioned by way of conversation the object of his sentimental journey, and the priest looked up sharply at him with raised eyebrows and an expression of surprise and suspicion that somehow piqued him.  He ascribed it to his difference of belief.

“Yes,” went on the silk merchant, pleased to talk of what his mind was so full, “and it was a curious experience for an English boy to be dropped down into a school of a hundred foreigners.  I well remember the loneliness and intolerable Heimweh of it at first.”  His German was very fluent.

The priest opposite looked up from his cold veal and potato salad and smiled.  It was a nice face.  He explained quietly that he did not belong here, but was making a tour of the parishes of Wurttemberg and Baden.

“It was a strict life,” added Harris.  “We English, I remember, used to call it Gefaengnisleben—­prison life!”

The face of the other, for some unaccountable reason, darkened.  After a slight pause, and more by way of politeness than because he wished to continue the subject, he said quietly—­

“It was a flourishing school in those days, of course.  Afterwards, I have heard—­” He shrugged his shoulders slightly, and the odd look—­it almost seemed a look of alarm—­came back into his eyes.  The sentence remained unfinished.

Something in the tone of the man seemed to his listener uncalled for—­in a sense reproachful, singular.  Harris bridled in spite of himself.

“It has changed?” he asked.  “I can hardly believe—­”

“You have not heard, then?” observed the priest gently, making a gesture as though to cross himself, yet not actually completing it.  “You have not heard what happened there before it was abandoned—?”

It was very childish, of course, and perhaps he was overtired and overwrought in some way, but the words and manner of the little priest seemed to him so offensive—­so disproportionately offensive—­that he hardly noticed the concluding sentence.  He recalled the old bitterness and the old antagonism, and for a moment he almost lost his temper.

“Nonsense,” he interrupted with a forced laugh, “Unsinn!  You must forgive me, sir, for contradicting you.  But I was a pupil there myself.  I was at school there.  There was no place like it.  I cannot believe that anything serious could have happened to—­to take away its character.  The devotion of the Brothers would be difficult to equal anywhere—­”