lready gone across to
Beatrice with an air of fright.

Then all these bewildered but partly amicable recognitions were cloven
by a cruel voice which always made all human blood turn bitter. The
Master was standing in the middle of the room surveying the scene like a
great artist looking at a completed picture. Handsome as he looked, they
had never seen so clearly what was really hateful in his face; and even
then they could only express it by saying that the arched brows and the
long emphatic chin gave it always a look of being lit from below, like
the face of some infernal actor.

"This is indeed a cosy party," he said, with glittering eyes.

The Master evidently meant to say more, but before he could say anything
M. Durand had stepped right up to him and was speaking.

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a
restaurant. That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity,
but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion. It was a steady,
monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but
merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop. He was saying
something like this:

"You refuse me my half-bottle of Medoc, the drink the most wholesome
and the most customary. You refuse me the company and obedience of my
daughter, which Nature herself indicates. You refuse me the beef and
mutton, without pretence that it is a fast of the Church. You now forbid
me the promenade, a thing necessary to a person of my age. It is useless
to tell me that you do all this by law. Law rests upon the social
contract. If the citizen finds himself despoiled of such pleasures
and powers as he would have had even in the savage state, the social
contract is annulled."

"It's no good chattering away, Monsieur," said Hutton, for the Master
was silent. "The place is covered with machine-guns. We've got to obey
our orders, and so have you."

"The machinery is of the most perfect," assented Durand, somewhat
irrelevantly; "worked by petroleum, I believe. I only ask you to admit
that if such things fall below the comfort of barbarism, the social
contract is annulled. It is a pretty little point of theory."

"Oh! I dare say," said Hutton.

Durand bowed quite civilly and withdrew.

"A cosy party," resumed the Master, scornfully, "and yet I believe some
of you are in doubt about how we all came together. I will explain
it, ladies and gentlemen; I will explain everything. To whom sha