el beasts!" cried Turnbull. "They've turned him to an
imbecile just by burying him alive. His brain's like a pin-point now."

"You are sure he is a lunatic?" said Evan, slowly.

"Not a lunatic," said Turnbull, "an idiot. He just points to things and
says that they stick out."

"He had a notion that he could help us," said MacIan moodily, and began
to pace towards the other end of his cell.

"Yes, it was a bit pathetic," assented Turnbull; "such a Thing offering
help, and besides---- Hallo! Hallo! What's the matter?"

"God Almighty guide us all!" said MacIan.

He was standing heavy and still at the other end of the room and staring
quietly at the door which for thirty days had sealed them up from the
sun. Turnbull, following the other's eye, stared at the door likewise,
and then he also uttered an exclamation. The iron door was standing
about an inch and a half open.

"He said----" began Evan, in a trembling voice--"he offered----"

"Come along, you fool!" shouted Turnbull with a sudden and furious
energy. "I see it all now, and it's the best stroke of luck in the
world. You pulled out that iron handle that had screwed up his cell, and
it somehow altered the machinery and opened all the doors."

Seizing MacIan by the elbow he bundled him bodily out into the open
corridor and ran him on till they saw daylight through a half-darkened
window.

"All the same," said Evan, like one answering in an ordinary
conversation, "he did ask you whether he could help you."

All this wilderness of windowless passages was so built into the heart
of that fortress of fear that it seemed more than an hour before the
fugitives had any good glimpse of the outer world. They did not even
know what hour of the day it was; and when, turning a corner, they saw
the bare tunnel of the corridor end abruptly in a shining square of
garden, the grass burning in that strong evening sunshine which makes
it burnished gold rather than green, the abrupt opening on to the earth
seemed like a hole knocked in the wall of heaven. Only once or twice
in life is it permitted to a man thus to see the very universe from
outside, and feel existence itself as an adorable adventure not yet
begun. As they found this shining escape out of that hellish labyrinth
they both had simultaneously the sensation of being babes unborn, of
being asked by God if they would like to live upon the earth. They were
looking in at one of the seven gates of Eden.

Turnbull was