Turnbull’s first movement after sixty motionless seconds was to turn round and look at the large, luxuriant parallelogram of the garden and the long, low rectangular building beyond.  There was not a soul or a stir of life within sight.  And he had a quite meaningless sensation, as if there never really had been any one else there except he since the foundation of the world.

Stiffening in himself the masculine but mirthless courage of the atheist, he drew a little nearer to the wall and, catching the man at a slightly different angle of the evening light, could see his face and figure quite plain.  Two facts about him stood out in the picked colours of some piratical schoolboy’s story.  The first was that his lean brown body was bare to the belt of his loose white trousers; the other that through hygiene, affectation, or whatever other cause, he had a scarlet handkerchief tied tightly but somewhat aslant across his brow.  After these two facts had become emphatic, others appeared sufficiently important.  One was that under the scarlet rag the hair was plentiful, but white as with the last snows of mortality.  Another was that under the mop of white and senile hair the face was strong, handsome, and smiling, with a well-cut profile and a long cloven chin.  The length of this lower part of the face and the strange cleft in it (which gave the man, in quite another sense from the common one, a double chin) faintly spoilt the claim of the face to absolute regularity, but it greatly assisted it in wearing the expression of half-smiling and half-sneering arrogance with which it was staring at all the stones, all the flowers, but especially at the solitary man.

“What do you want?” shouted Turnbull.

“I want you, Jimmy,” said the eccentric man on the wall, and with the very word he had let himself down with a leap on to the centre of the lawn, where he bounded once literally like an India-rubber ball and then stood grinning with his legs astride.  The only three facts that Turnbull could now add to his inventory were that the man had an ugly-looking knife swinging at his trousers belt, that his brown feet were as bare as his bronzed trunk and arms, and that his eyes had a singular bleak brilliancy which was of no particular colour.

“Excuse my not being in evening dress,” said the newcomer with an urbane smile.  “We scientific men, you know—­I have to work my own engines—­electrical engineer—­very hot work.”

“Look here,” said Turnbull, sturdily clenching his fists in his trousers pockets, “I am bound to expect lunatics inside these four walls; but I do bar their coming from outside, bang out of the sunset clouds.”

“And yet you came from the outside, too, Jim,” said the stranger in a voice almost affectionate.

“What do you want?” asked Turnbull, with an explosion of temper as sudden as a pistol shot.

“I have already told you,” said the man, lowering his voice and speaking with evident sincerity; “I want you.”