"After all," I reasoned within myself, "in a few moments I shall know the best and worst about these quaintly-garbed people. It is useless to anticipate. So far as I know there is only one rule to guide a man at a moment like this, and that was given me by a man who had money and much leisure coupled with the mania to belong to all the secret societies in existence. He it was who said: `Whatever they ask you to do, do it; whatever they ask you to say, say it; whatever they ask you to believe, believe it.' In one word, reverence is the true keynote to all these initiations, and possessed of this every man may go forward with confidence and good will, certain that by its use he will flatter his fellow-members and save himself a good deal of confusion and shamefacedness." Hence I arose immediately I was bidden and, signifying my willingness to proceed, followed the Spaniard down the corridor, which all at once had grown strangely silent and gloomy-looking, for the gas lights had now been lowered to a tiny blue glimmer, and as I moved forward I caught the sound of a low dirge-like chant that might well have passed for an Office of the Dead. Now music at such a moment is a very curious and powerful agent. Indeed, I don't know what some secret societies would do without it. Although I had quite made up my mind not to be impressed by this initiation but to keep every nerve and sense on the alert to see if treachery were afoot regarding that Lake of Sacred Treasure, I caught myself again and again giving way to a shiver. Indeed, now and then the sounds would break from a plain chant into a long, low mournful wail of anguish inexpressibly pitiful and sad, summoning at a note, as it were, all the grisly, ghostly spectres of the hearer's dead and gone memories and making friends walk in imagination that had long since gathered their tired muscles together and stretched their weary limbs out in a last sleep from which no human hand should ever awaken them. At length, with nerves strung up to a painful tension, I was led into a tiny vault-like cell, and the door suddenly closed upon me. At first, so abrupt was the change, that I could see nothing. But after a time my eyes managed to pierce the gloom, and through the half lights I saw in front of me an old monk seated at a table poring over a huge and musty volume. For two or three minutes he took no notice of me at all. Then suddenly, when I least expected it, he looked up at me, and his expression was calm, benign, yet dignified. "I understand," he began in a rich, penetrating voice that had a wonderful melody in it, "that you have, for some selfish reason of your own, decided to seek election in our Order of St Bruno. You are no stranger to secret societies or their methods, and you think it a cheap and an easy way to get at certain facts which you are anxious to possess."