believe that the Bank of
England might paint itself pink with white spots."

"I don't understand," answered Turnbull. "Why should you be surprised at
my fighting? I hope I have always fought."

"Well," said Cumberland Vane, airily, "you didn't believe in religion,
you see--so we thought you were safe at any rate. You went further in
your language than most of us wanted to go; no good in just hurting
one's mother's feelings, I think. But of course we all knew you were
right, and, really, we relied on you."

"Did you?" said the editor of _The Atheist_ with a bursting heart. "I am
sorry you did not tell me so at the time."

He walked away very rapidly and flung himself on a garden seat, and for
some six minutes his own wrongs hid from him the huge and hilarious fact
that Cumberland Vane had been locked up as a lunatic.

The garden of the madhouse was so perfectly planned, and answered so
exquisitely to every hour of daylight, that one could almost fancy that
the sunlight was caught there tangled in its tinted trees, as the wise
men of Gotham tried to chain the spring to a bush. Or it seemed as if
this ironic paradise still kept its unique dawn or its special sunset
while the rest of the earthly globe rolled through its ordinary hours.
There was one evening, or late afternoon, in particular, which Evan
MacIan will remember in the last moments of death. It was what artists
call a daffodil sky, but it is coarsened even by reference to a
daffodil. It was of that innocent lonely yellow which has never heard of
orange, though it might turn quite unconsciously into green. Against it
the tops, one might say the turrets, of the clipt and ordered trees
were outlined in that shade of veiled violet which tints the tops of
lavender. A white early moon was hardly traceable upon that delicate
yellow. MacIan, I say, will remember this tender and transparent
evening, partly because of its virgin gold and silver, and partly
because he passed beneath it through the most horrible instant of his
life.

Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden evening
impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might have impressed
the oxen in a field. He was shocked out of his idle mood of awe by
seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes and run across the lawn with
an action he had never seen in the man before, with all his experience
of the eccentric humours of this Celt. MacIan fell on the bench,
shaking it so that it rattl