"In your case, the plan agreed on was a very simple but an effective one. The first idea was to give you a fright, and then to take you off on all manner of excursions, so that you would not realise when the supreme test came what and which it was. Hence the deaths on the mountain and in the snowstorm. The real trial came when we played with all the force we could on the one string we knew held you like a vice-- your love of manuscripts. Would you respond to this and renounce your birthright, or not? "Luckily, you did not, although we bent every energy we had, every trick we knew, to lure you into the trap, using hasheesh, chloroform, anything that suited our purpose, to make our stage scenes seem to you the more vital, the more real. In the end you made the supreme refusal--you would not cease to be an Englishman. Therefore all our show ended as suddenly as it had begun. We had tested you, and we had found you were really the patriot you had always pretended to be to Jose Casteno when any question arose of the safety or the use of those three manuscripts that gave the whereabouts of the Lake of Sacred Treasure. "We wanted to learn no more then. We decided there and then that you were the kind of novice which the Order of St Bruno required, and we hastened back to our proper garbs again, anxious only now to bring the ceremony of initiation to an end. Hence it has come about that only one other test remains to be applied to you, and then you will be free to enter forthwith on all the rights and privileges of our brotherhood, which are, I am to explain, very numerous, far-reaching, and valuable. "Do not fear it. In character, in effect, it is totally different to any experience you have been through; but our noble founder, Bruno Delganni, held it to be a very precious expedient to practise, and in his institutes, which we follow with scrupulous exactness, he lays it down in the clearest fashion that on no account must we omit it, however enthusiastic we may feel at the conduct of our novice in the other and more theatrical tests we have applied to him." "Very well," I said resignedly. "I am prepared. Do with me as you will." And taking the glass of wine he pressed on me I drained it, and then seated myself once more in the chair to await developments, although in my inmost heart I felt so upset and confused that I hardly knew how to speak. With a stately inclination of the head the old monk passed through the doorway and left me. Slowly, very very slowly, the light faded, and then I became surrounded by soft greyish darkness that afflicted me with a sense of intense mournfulness. CHAPTER TWENTY ONE. THE USE OF THE IMAGE.