Turnbull was sitting on his seat on the lawn, and the golden evening impressed even his positive nature, as indeed it might have impressed the oxen in a field.  He was shocked out of his idle mood of awe by seeing MacIan break from behind the bushes and run across the lawn with an action he had never seen in the man before, with all his experience of the eccentric humours of this Celt.  MacIan fell on the bench, shaking it so that it rattled, and gripped it with his knees like one in dreadful pain of body.  That particular run and tumble is typical only of a man who has been hit by some sudden and incurable evil, who is bitten by a viper or condemned to be hanged.  Turnbull looked up in the white face of his friend and enemy, and almost turned cold at what he saw there.  He had seen the blue but gloomy eyes of the western Highlander troubled by as many tempests as his own west Highland seas, but there had always been a fixed star of faith behind the storms.  Now the star had gone out, and there was only misery.

Yet MacIan had the strength to answer the question where Turnbull, taken by surprise, had not the strength to ask it.

“They are right, they are right!” he cried.  “O my God! they are right, Turnbull.  I ought to be here!”

He went on with shapeless fluency as if he no longer had the heart to choose or check his speech.  “I suppose I ought to have guessed long ago—­all my big dreams and schemes—­and everyone being against us—­but I was stuck up, you know.”

“Do tell me about it, really,” cried the atheist, and, faced with the furnace of the other’s pain, he did not notice that he spoke with the affection of a father.

“I am mad, Turnbull,” said Evan, with a dead clearness of speech, and leant back against the garden seat.

“Nonsense,” said the other, clutching at the obvious cue of benevolent brutality, “this is one of your silly moods.”

MacIan shook his head.  “I know enough about myself,” he said, “to allow for any mood, though it opened heaven or hell.  But to see things—­to see them walking solid in the sun—­things that can’t be there—­real mystics never do that, Turnbull.”

“What things?” asked the other, incredulously.

MacIan lowered his voice.  “I saw her,” he said, “three minutes ago—­walking here in this hell yard.”

Between trying to look scornful and really looking startled, Turnbull’s face was confused enough to emit no speech, and Evan went on in monotonous sincerity: 

“I saw her walk behind those blessed trees against that holy sky of gold as plain as I can see her whenever I shut my eyes.  I did shut them, and opened them again, and she was still there—­that is, of course, she wasn’t——­ She still had a little fur round her neck, but her dress was a shade brighter than when I really saw her.”

“My dear fellow,” cried Turnbull, rallying a hearty laugh, “the fancies have really got hold of you.  You mistook some other poor girl here for her.”