gram of the garden and
the long, low rectangular building beyond. There was not a soul or a
stir of life within sight. And he had a quite meaningless sensation, as
if there never really had been any one else there except he since the
foundation of the world.

Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirthless courage of the
atheist, he drew a little nearer to the wall and, catching the man at
a slightly different angle of the evening light, could see his face and
figure quite plain. Two facts about him stood out in the picked colours
of some piratical schoolboy's story. The first was that his lean brown
body was bare to the belt of his loose white trousers; the other that
through hygiene, affectation, or whatever other cause, he had a scarlet
handkerchief tied tightly but somewhat aslant across his brow. After
these two facts had become emphatic, others appeared sufficiently
important. One was that under the scarlet rag the hair was plentiful,
but white as with the last snows of mortality. Another was that under
the mop of white and senile hair the face was strong, handsome, and
smiling, with a well-cut profile and a long cloven chin. The length of
this lower part of the face and the strange cleft in it (which gave the
man, in quite another sense from the common one, a double chin) faintly
spoilt the claim of the face to absolute regularity, but it greatly
assisted it in wearing the expression of half-smiling and half-sneering
arrogance with which it was staring at all the stones, all the flowers,
but especially at the solitary man.

"What do you want?" shouted Turnbull.

"I want you, Jimmy," said the eccentric man on the wall, and with the
very word he had let himself down with a leap on to the centre of the
lawn, where he bounded once literally like an India-rubber ball and then
stood grinning with his legs astride. The only three facts that Turnbull
could now add to his inventory were that the man had an ugly-looking
knife swinging at his trousers belt, that his brown feet were as bare
as his bronzed trunk and arms, and that his eyes had a singular bleak
brilliancy which was of no particular colour.

"Excuse my not being in evening dress," said the newcomer with an
urbane smile. "We scientific men, you know--I have to work my own
engines--electrical engineer--very hot work."

"Look here," said Turnbull, sturdily clenching his fists in his trousers
pockets, "I am bound to expect lunatics inside these four walls; b