I have
dragged on my inhuman escapades, you cannot keep him. He will go free,
thank God, he is not down in any damned document. His ancestor, I am
certain, did not die at Culloden. His mother, I swear, had no relics.
Let my friend out of your front door, and as for me----"

The doctor had already gone across to the laden shelves, and after a few
minutes' short-sighted peering, had pulled down another parallelogram of
dark-red wood.

This also he unlocked on the table, and with the same unerring
egotistic eye on of the company saw the words, written in large letters:
"Turnbull, James."

Hitherto Turnbull himself had somewhat scornfully surrendered his part
in the whole business; but he was too honest and unaffected not to
start at his own name. After the name, the inscription appeared to run:
"Unique case of Eleutheromania. Parentage, as so often in such cases,
prosaic and healthy. Eleutheromaniac signs occurred early, however,
leading him to attach himself to the individualist Bradlaugh. Recent
outbreak of pure anarchy----"

Turnbull slammed the case to, almost smashing it, and said with a burst
of savage laughter: "Oh! come along, MacIan; I don't care so much, even
about getting out of the madhouse, if only we get out of this room. You
were right enough, MacIan, when you spoke about--about mad doctors."

Somehow they found themselves outside in the cool, green garden, and
then, after a stunned silence, Turnbull said: "There is one thing that
was puzzling me all the time, and I understand it now."

"What do you mean?" asked Evan.

"No man by will or wit," answered Turnbull, "can get out of this garden;
and yet we got into it merely by jumping over a garden wall. The whole
thing explains itself easily enough. That undefended wall was an open
trap. It was a trap laid for two celebrated lunatics. They saw us get in
right enough. And they will see that we do not get out."

Evan gazed at the garden wall, gravely for more than a minute, and then
he nodded without a word.

XV. THE DREAM OF MACIAN

The system of espionage in the asylum was so effective and complete that
in practice the patients could often enjoy a sense of almost complete
solitude. They could stray up so near to the wall in an apparently
unwatched garden as to find it easy to jump over it. They would only
have found the error of their calculations if they had tried to jump.

Under this insulting liberty, in this artificial loneliness, Evan Ma