“What do you want with me?”

“I want exactly what you want,” said the new-comer with a new gravity.  “I want the Revolution.”

Turnbull looked at the fire-swept sky and the wind-stricken woodlands, and kept on repeating the word voicelessly to himself—­the word that did indeed so thoroughly express his mood of rage as it had been among those red clouds and rocking tree-tops.  “Revolution!” he said to himself.  “The Revolution—­yes, that is what I want right enough—­anything, so long as it is a Revolution.”

To some cause he could never explain he found himself completing the sentence on the top of the wall, having automatically followed the stranger so far.  But when the stranger silently indicated the rope that led to the machine, he found himself pausing and saying:  “I can’t leave MacIan behind in this den.”

“We are going to destroy the Pope and all the kings,” said the new-comer.  “Would it be wiser to take him with us?”

Somehow the muttering Turnbull found himself in the flying ship also, and it swung up into the sunset.

“All the great rebels have been very little rebels,” said the man with the red scarf.  “They have been like fourth-form boys who sometimes venture to hit a fifth-form boy.  That was all the worth of their French Revolution and regicide.  The boys never really dared to defy the schoolmaster.”

“Whom do you mean by the schoolmaster?” asked Turnbull.

“You know whom I mean,” answered the strange man, as he lay back on cushions and looked up into the angry sky.

They seemed rising into stronger and stronger sunlight, as if it were sunrise rather than sunset.  But when they looked down at the earth they saw it growing darker and darker.  The lunatic asylum in its large rectangular grounds spread below them in a foreshortened and infantile plan, and looked for the first time the grotesque thing that it was.  But the clear colours of the plan were growing darker every moment.  The masses of rose or rhododendron deepened from crimson to violet.  The maze of gravel pathways faded from gold to brown.  By the time they had risen a few hundred feet higher nothing could be seen of that darkening landscape except the lines of lighted windows, each one of which, at least, was the light of one lost intelligence.  But on them as they swept upward better and braver winds seemed to blow, and on them the ruby light of evening seemed struck, and splashed like red spurts from the grapes of Dionysus.  Below them the fallen lights were literally the fallen stars of servitude.  And above them all the red and raging clouds were like the leaping flags of liberty.

The man with the cloven chin seemed to have a singular power of understanding thoughts; for, as Turnbull felt the whole universe tilt and turn over his head, the stranger said exactly the right thing.

“Doesn’t it seem as if everything were being upset?” said he; “and if once everything is upset, He will be upset on top of it.”