e fog of it, and red
sparks began to swarm like scarlet bees.

"The place is on fire!" cried Quayle with a scream of indecent terror.
"Oh, who can have done it? How can it have happened?"

A light had come into Turnbull's eyes. "How did the French Revolution
happen?" he asked.

"Oh, how should I know!" wailed the other.

"Then I will tell you," said Turnbull; "it happened because some people
fancied that a French grocer was as respectable as he looked."

Even as he spoke, as if by confirmation, old Mr. Durand re-entered the
smoky room quite placidly, wiping the petroleum from his hands with a
handkerchief. He had set fire to the building in accordance with the
strict principles of the social contract.

But MacIan had taken a stride forward and stood there shaken and
terrible. "Now," he cried, panting, "now is the judgement of the world.
The doctors will leave this place; the keepers will leave this place.
They will leave us in charge of the machinery and the machine-guns at
the windows. But we, the lunatics, will wait to be burned alive if only
we may see them go."

"How do you know we shall go?" asked Hutton, fiercely.

"You believe nothing," said MacIan, simply, "and you are insupportably
afraid of death."

"So this is suicide," sneered the doctor; "a somewhat doubtful sign of
sanity."

"Not at all--this is vengeance," answered Turnbull, quite calmly; "a
thing which is completely healthy."

"You think the doctors will go," said Hutton, savagely.

"The keepers have gone already," said Turnbull.

Even as they spoke the main doors were burst open in mere brutal panic,
and all the officers and subordinates of the asylum rushed away across
the garden pursued by the smoke. But among the ticketed maniacs not a
man or woman moved.

"We hate dying," said Turnbull, with composure, "but we hate you even
more. This is a successful revolution."

In the roof above their heads a panel shot back, showing a strip of
star-lit sky and a huge thing made of white metal, with the shape and
fins of a fish, swinging as if at anchor. At the same moment a steel
ladder slid down from the opening and struck the floor, and the cleft
chin of the mysterious Master was thrust into the opening. "Quayle,
Hutton," he said, "you will escape with me." And they went up the ladder
like automata of lead.

Long after they had clambered into the car, the creature with the cloven
face continued to leer down upon the smoke-stung crowd below