;
his voice sounded remote and rude, like the voice of a statue.

Those who had so long danced and disputed round his immobility
were left breathless by his precipitance. With a run and spring
he was out of the garden into the street; with a spring and
one quivering kick he was actually on the roof of the cab.
The cabman happened to be standing by the horse's head, having just
removed its emptied nose-bag. Smith seemed for an instant to be
rolling about on the cab's back in the embraces of his Gladstone bag.
The next instant, however, he had rolled, as if by a royal luck,
into the high seat behind, and with a shriek of piercing and
appalling suddenness had sent the horse flying and scampering
down the street.

His evanescence was so violent and swift, that this time it
was all the other people who were turned into garden statues.
Mr. Moses Gould, however, being ill-adapted both physically and morally
for the purposes of permanent sculpture, came to life some time before
the rest, and, turning to Moon, remarked, like a man starting chattily
with a stranger on an omnibus, "Tile loose, eh? Cab loose anyhow."
There followed a fatal silence; and then Dr. Warner said, with a sneer
like a club of stone,--

"This is what comes of the Court of Beacon, Mr. Moon. You have let
loose a maniac on the whole metropolis."

Beacon House stood, as has been said, at the end of a long crescent
of continuous houses. The little garden that shut it in ran out into
a sharp point like a green cape pushed out into the sea of two streets.
Smith and his cab shot up one side of the triangle, and certainly
most of those standing inside of it never expected to see him again.
At the apex, however, he turned the horse sharply round and drove with equal
violence up the other side of the garden, visible to all those in the group.
With a common impulse the little crowd ran across the lawn as if to stop him,
but they soon had reason to duck and recoil. Even as he vanished up
street for the second time, he let the big yellow bag fly from his hand,
so that it fell in the centre of the garden, scattering the company
like a bomb, and nearly damaging Dr. Warner's hat for the third time.
Long before they had collected themselves, the cab had shot away with a
shriek that went into a whisper.

"Well," said Michael Moon, with a queer note in his voice;
"you may as well all go inside anyhow. We've got two relics
of Mr. Smith at least; his fiancee and his