hat since--since those two dreams, or whatever they
were----"

"Well?" murmured MacIan.

"Since then," went on Turnbull, in the same low voice, "since then we
have never even looked for our swords."

"You are right," answered Evan almost inaudibly. "We have found
something which we both hate more than we ever hated each other, and I
think I know its name."

Turnbull seemed to frown and flinch for a moment. "It does not much
matter what you call it," he said, "so long as you keep out of its way."

The bushes broke and snapped abruptly behind them, and a very tall
figure towered above Turnbull with an arrogant stoop and a projecting
chin, a chin of which the shape showed queerly even in its shadow upon
the path.

"You see that is not so easy," said MacIan between his teeth.

They looked up into the eyes of the Master, but looked only for a
moment. The eyes were full of a frozen and icy wrath, a kind of utterly
heartless hatred. His voice was for the first time devoid of irony.
There was no more sarcasm in it than there is in an iron club.

"You will be inside the building in three minutes," he said, with
pulverizing precision, "or you will be fired on by the artillery at
all the windows. There is too much talking in this garden; we intend to
close it. You will be accommodated indoors."

"Ah!" said MacIan, with a long and satisfied sigh, "then I was right."

And he turned his back and walked obediently towards the building.
Turnbull seemed to canvass for a few minutes the notion of knocking the
Master down, and then fell under the same almost fairy fatalism as his
companion. In some strange way it did seem that the more smoothly they
yielded, the more swiftly would events sweep on to some great collision.

XX. DIES IRAE

As they advanced towards the asylum they looked up at its rows on rows
of windows, and understood the Master's material threat. By means of
that complex but concealed machinery which ran like a network of nerves
over the whole fabric, there had been shot out under every window-ledge
rows and rows of polished-steel cylinders, the cold miracles of modern
gunnery. They commanded the whole garden and the whole country-side, and
could have blown to pieces an army corps.

This silent declaration of war had evidently had its complete effect. As
MacIan and Turnbull walked steadily but slowly towards the entrance hall
of the institution, they could see that most, or at least many, of the
patie