en. They noticed nothing special
about the scene, except that the garden seemed more exquisite than ever
in the deepening sunset, and that there seemed to be many more people,
whether patients or attendants, walking about in it.

From behind the two black-coated doctors as they stood on the lawn
another figure somewhat similarly dressed strode hurriedly past them,
having also grizzled hair and an open flapping frock-coat. Both his
decisive step and dapper black array marked him out as another medical
man, or at least a man in authority, and as he passed Turnbull the
latter was aroused by a strong impression of having seen the man
somewhere before. It was no one that he knew well, yet he was certain
that it was someone at whom he had at sometime or other looked steadily.
It was neither the face of a friend nor of an enemy; it aroused neither
irritation nor tenderness, yet it was a face which had for some reason
been of great importance in his life. Turning and returning, and making
detours about the garden, he managed to study the man's face again and
again--a moustached, somewhat military face with a monocle, the sort of
face that is aristocratic without being distinguished. Turnbull could
not remember any particular doctors in his decidedly healthy existence.
Was the man a long-lost uncle, or was he only somebody who had sat
opposite him regularly in a railway train? At that moment the man
knocked down his own eye-glass with a gesture of annoyance; Turnbull
remembered the gesture, and the truth sprang up solid in front of him.
The man with the moustaches was Cumberland Vane, the London police
magistrate before whom he and MacIan had once stood on their trial. The
magistrate must have been transferred to some other official duties--to
something connected with the inspection of asylums.

Turnbull's heart gave a leap of excitement which was half hope. As a
magistrate Mr. Cumberland Vane had been somewhat careless and shallow,
but certainly kindly, and not inaccessible to common sense so long as
it was put to him in strictly conventional language. He was at least an
authority of a more human and refreshing sort than the crank with the
wagging beard or the fiend with the forked chin.

He went straight up to the magistrate, and said: "Good evening, Mr.
Vane; I doubt if you remember me."

Cumberland Vane screwed the eye-glass into his scowling face for an
instant, and then said curtly but not uncivilly: "Yes, I remember yo