My father was sitting in his chair, with his coat and waistcoat off, Mr.Bryerly kneeling on a stool beside him, rather facing him, his black scratch wig leaning close to my father's grizzled hair.

There was a large tome of their divinity lore, I suppose, open on the table close by.

The lank black figure of Mr.Bryerly stood up, and he concealed something quickly in the breast of his coat.
My father stood up also, looking paler, I think, than I ever saw him till then, and he pointed grimly to the door, and said, 'Go.' Mr.Bryerly pushed me gently back with his hands to my shoulders, and smiled down from his dark features with an expression quite unintelligible to me.
I had recovered myself in a second, and withdrew without a word.

The last thing I saw at the door was the tall, slim figure in black, and the dark, significant smile following me: and then the door was shut and locked, and the two Swedenborgians were left to their mysteries.
I remember so well the kind of shock and disgust I felt in the certainty that I had surprised them at some, perhaps, debasing incantation--a suspicion of this Mr.Bryerly, of the ill-fitting black coat, and white choker--and a sort of fear came upon me, and I fancied he was asserting some kind of mastery over my father, which very much alarmed me.
I fancied all sorts of dangers in the enigmatical smile of the lank high-priest.

The image of my father, as I had seen him, it might be, confessing to this man in black, who was I knew not what, haunted me with the disagreeable uncertainties of a mind very uninstructed as to the limits of the marvellous.
I mentioned it to no one.