hereditary in their heads--the whole air they breathe is mad."

"All the same," said Turnbull, shrewdly, "I bet you haven't found a
madman of that sort."

"I bet I have!" cried Evan, with unusual animation. "I've been walking
about the garden talking to a poor chap all the morning. He's simply
been broken down and driven raving by your damned science. Talk about
believing one is God--why, it's quite an old, comfortable, fireside
fancy compared with the sort of things this fellow believes. He believes
that there is a God, but that he is better than God. He says God will be
afraid to face him. He says one is always progressing beyond the best.
He put his arm in mine and whispered in my ear, as if it were the
apocalypse: 'Never trust a God that you can't improve on.'"

"What can he have meant?" said the atheist, with all his logic awake.
"Obviously one should not trust any God that one can improve on."

"It is the way he talks," said MacIan, almost indifferently; "but he
says rummier things than that. He says that a man's doctor ought to
decide what woman he marries; and he says that children ought not to
be brought up by their parents, because a physical partiality will then
distort the judgement of the educator."

"Oh, dear!" said Turnbull, laughing, "you have certainly come across a
pretty bad case, and incidentally proved your own. I suppose some men do
lose their wits through science as through love and other good things."

"And he says," went on MacIan, monotonously, "that he cannot see why
anyone should suppose that a triangle is a three-sided figure. He says
that on some higher plane----"

Turnbull leapt to his feet as by an electric shock. "I never could have
believed," he cried, "that you had humour enough to tell a lie. You've
gone a bit too far, old man, with your little joke. Even in a lunatic
asylum there can't be anybody who, having thought about the matter,
thinks that a triangle has not got three sides. If he exists he must be
a new era in human psychology. But he doesn't exist."

"I will go and fetch him," said MacIan, calmly; "I left the poor fellow
wandering about by the nasturtium bed."

MacIan vanished, and in a few moments returned, trailing with him his
own discovery among lunatics, who was a slender man with a fixed smile
and an unfixed and rolling head. He had a goatlike beard just long
enough to be shaken in a strong wind. Turnbull sprang to his feet
and was like one who is speechless