aid it.

"Oh, don't you know?" she said, smiling, and suddenly lifting her level
brown eyebrows. "Haven't you heard the news? I'm a lunatic."

Then she added after a short pause, and with a sort of pride: "I've got
a certificate."

Her manner, by the matchless social stoicism of her sex, was entirely
suited to a drawing-room, but Evan's reply fell somewhat far short of
such a standard, as he only said: "What the devil in hell does all this
nonsense mean?"

"Really," said the young lady, and laughed.

"I beg your pardon," said the unhappy young man, rather wildly, "but
what I mean is, why are you here in an asylum?"

The young woman broke again into one of the maddening and mysterious
laughs of femininity. Then she composed her features, and replied with
equal dignity: "Well, if it comes to that, why are you?"

The fact that Turnbull had strolled away and was investigating
rhododendrons may have been due to Evan's successful prayers to the
other world, or possibly to his own pretty successful experience of this
one. But though they two were as isolated as a new Adam and Eve in a
pretty ornamental Eden, the lady did not relax by an inch the rigour of
her badinage.

"I am locked up in the madhouse," said Evan, with a sort of stiff pride,
"because I tried to keep my promise to you."

"Quite so," answered the inexplicable lady, nodding with a perfectly
blazing smile, "and I am locked up because it was to me you promised."

"It is outrageous!" cried Evan; "it is impossible!"

"Oh, you can see my certificate if you like," she replied with some
hauteur.

MacIan stared at her and then at his boots, and then at the sky and then
at her again. He was quite sure now that he himself was not mad, and the
fact rather added to his perplexity.

Then he drew nearer to her, and said in a dry and dreadful voice: "Oh,
don't condescend to play the fool with such a fool as me. Are you really
locked up here as a patient--because you helped us to escape?"

"Yes," she said, still smiling, but her steady voice had a shake in it.

Evan flung his big elbow across his forehead and burst into tears.

The pure lemon of the sky faded into purer white as the great sunset
silently collapsed. The birds settled back into the trees; the moon
began to glow with its own light. Mr. James Turnbull continued his
botanical researches into the structure of the rhododendron. But the
lady did not move an inch until Evan had flung up his face again;