He marched on and on.  There was powdered gold in the sky till the moon rose, and then a wind of faint silver spread silently between the earth and stars.  He saw the tips of the fir trees shimmer, and heard them whisper as the breeze turned their needles towards the light.  The mountain air was indescribably sweet.  The road shone like the foam of a river through the gloom.  White moths flitted here and there like silent thoughts across his path, and a hundred smells greeted him from the forest caverns across the years.

Then, when he least expected it, the trees fell away abruptly on both sides, and he stood on the edge of the village clearing.

He walked faster.  There lay the familiar outlines of the houses, sheeted with silver; there stood the trees in the little central square with the fountain and small green lawns; there loomed the shape of the church next to the Gasthof der Bruedergemeinde; and just beyond, dimly rising into the sky, he saw with a sudden thrill the mass of the huge school building, blocked castlelike with deep shadows in the moonlight, standing square and formidable to face him after the silences of more than a quarter of a century.

He passed quickly down the deserted village street and stopped close beneath its shadow, staring up at the walls that had once held him prisoner for two years—­two unbroken years of discipline and homesickness.  Memories and emotions surged through his mind; for the most vivid sensations of his youth had focused about this spot, and it was here he had first begun to live and learn values.  Not a single footstep broke the silence, though lights glimmered here and there through cottage windows; but when he looked up at the high walls of the school, draped now in shadow, he easily imagined that well-known faces crowded to the windows to greet him—­closed windows that really reflected only moonlight and the gleam of stars.

This, then, was the old school building, standing foursquare to the world, with its shuttered windows, its lofty, tiled roof, and the spiked lightning-conductors pointing like black and taloned fingers from the corners.  For a long time he stood and stared.  Then, presently, he came to himself again, and realised to his joy that a light still shone in the windows of the Bruderstube.

He turned from the road and passed through the iron railings; then climbed the twelve stone steps and stood facing the black wooden door with the heavy bars of iron, a door he had once loathed and dreaded with the hatred and passion of an imprisoned soul, but now looked upon tenderly with a sort of boyish delight.

Almost timorously he pulled the rope and listened with a tremor of excitement to the clanging of the bell deep within the building.  And the long-forgotten sound brought the past before him with such a vivid sense of reality that he positively shivered.  It was like the magic bell in the fairy-tale that rolls back the curtain of Time and summons the figures from the shadows of the dead.  He had never felt so sentimental in his life.  It was like being young again.  And, at the same time, he began to bulk rather large in his own eyes with a certain spurious importance.  He was a big man from the world of strife and action.  In this little place of peaceful dreams would he, perhaps, not cut something of a figure?