ked, anxiously.

"I am dying," answered the other quite calmly. "I am in the quite
literal sense of the words dying to know something. I want to know what
all this can possibly mean."

MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity: "You are still
thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is incredible.
She's not the only person here. I've met the fellow Wilkinson, whose
yacht we lost. I've met the very magistrate you were hauled up to when
you broke my window. What can it mean--meeting all these old people
again? One never meets such old friends again except in a dream."

Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity: "Are you really
there, Evan? Have you ever been really there? Am I simply dreaming?"

MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word, and now
his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.

"No, you good atheist," he cried; "no, you clean, courteous, reverent,
pious old blasphemer. No, you are not dreaming--you are waking up."

"What do you mean?"

"There are two states where one meets so many old friends," said MacIan;
"one is a dream, the other is the end of the world."

"And you say----"

"I say this is not a dream," said Evan in a ringing voice.

"You really mean to suggest----" began Turnbull.

"Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong," said MacIan, breathing hard.
"It's hard to explain, anyhow. An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream.
A dream is falser than the outer life. But the end of the world is more
actual than the world it ends. I don't say this is really the end of the
world, but it's something like that--it's the end of something. All the
people are crowding into one corner. Everything is coming to a point."

"What is the point?" asked Turnbull.

"I can't see it," said Evan; "it is too large and plain."

Then after a silence he said: "I can't see it--and yet I will try to
describe it. Turnbull, three days ago I saw quite suddenly that our duel
was not right after all."

"Three days ago!" repeated Turnbull. "When and why did this illumination
occur?"

"I knew I was not quite right," answered Evan, "the moment I saw the
round eyes of that old man in the cell."

"Old man in the cell!" repeated his wondering companion. "Do you mean
the poor old idiot who likes spikes to stick out?"

"Yes," said MacIan, after a slight pause, "I mean the poor old idiot
who likes spikes to stick out. When I saw his eyes and heard his old