When silence had been restored he began to speak; and never, since he had addressed the first Gathering, had so deep a note of domination and decision been audible in his voice.
"Mystics!" he cried, "there is no time for preamble or delay.

As the Arch-Mystic says, you must have truth! Perhaps there is no need to tell you that the history I have just related to you has an imminent bearing upon your lives and mine.

You probably know, without my telling, that the boy of my story and I are one and the same person; that the fanatic sect, for which I was made a beggar, is your own sect--the sect of the Mystics.

But so it is.

On a wild, dark night ten years ago I learned that the money which should have been mine--the money which should have been the recompense for my mother's hard life--had been given to you.
Given for the use of a Prophet in whose coming you believed! "My feelings on that night were the criminal feelings that underlie all civilization.