Crossword-Solution: ISSAD 5 letters, 1 clue 🏆 scrabble score: 6

But a priest of a secret order, ordained twenty-seven years ago when in the smug security of the orderly Rowland house in West Fifty-ninth Street, he had been born--the thing was unthinkable! But there before him, treading soberly, her slender figure clad in a modish frock which must have come from the Rue de la Paix, was Tanya; and there behind him, in the arms of Picard, Issad and the shock-headed man, was the dead Ivanitch, in token that the prediction of the legends of Nemi had been fulfilled.

Who was this visitor, and what his mission, what his power, what his authority? Stepan threw the door open and stood aside, bowing as the visitor entered, followed by Issad and Picard.

Rowland keenly watched all the actors in this drama, the zealous sincerity of the excitable Frenchman, the mystic absorption of Stepan, the fixed burning gaze of Issad, sure that those who played the minor parts were committed beyond question to a strict interpretation of the symbols of the order.

But it is a sign too definite to be ignored--an act of Revelation and a Prophecy." The words were spoken soberly, with an air of rapt introspection, but Rowland missed nothing of the alert intelligence of Monsieur Khodkine’s pale blue eyes, keen and observing, which unlike Issad, the dreamer’s, fairly blazed with objectivity.

But under this skillful camouflage of mere words, which though they may have meant much to Issad, Stepan and Picard, conveyed nothing to Rowland, he hid his disappointment well, and when all questions had been answered, he went and viewed the dead Ivanitch and agreed as the others had done to an immediate interment of the body.