with a certain cadence or trivial turns of the neck or wrist.  Into the middle of his stationary and senseless enjoyment were thrust abruptly the projecting elbow and the projecting red beard of Turnbull.  MacIan stepped back a little, and the soul in his eyes came very slowly to its windows.  When James Turnbull had the glittering sword-point planted upon his breast he was in far less danger.  For three pulsating seconds after the interruption MacIan was in a mood to have murdered his father.

And yet his whole emotional anger fell from him when he saw Turnbull’s face, in which the eyes seemed to be bursting from the head like bullets.  All the fire and fragrance even of young and honourable love faded for a moment before that stiff agony of interrogation.

“Are you hurt, Turnbull?” he asked, anxiously.

“I am dying,” answered the other quite calmly.  “I am in the quite literal sense of the words dying to know something.  I want to know what all this can possibly mean.”

MacIan did not answer, and he continued with asperity:  “You are still thinking about that girl, but I tell you the whole thing is incredible.  She’s not the only person here.  I’ve met the fellow Wilkinson, whose yacht we lost.  I’ve met the very magistrate you were hauled up to when you broke my window.  What can it mean—­meeting all these old people again?  One never meets such old friends again except in a dream.”

Then after a silence he cried with a rending sincerity:  “Are you really there, Evan?  Have you ever been really there?  Am I simply dreaming?”

MacIan had been listening with a living silence to every word, and now his face flamed with one of his rare revelations of life.

“No, you good atheist,” he cried; “no, you clean, courteous, reverent, pious old blasphemer.  No, you are not dreaming—­you are waking up.”

“What do you mean?”

“There are two states where one meets so many old friends,” said MacIan; “one is a dream, the other is the end of the world.”

“And you say——­”

“I say this is not a dream,” said Evan in a ringing voice.

“You really mean to suggest——­” began Turnbull.

“Be silent! or I shall say it all wrong,” said MacIan, breathing hard.  “It’s hard to explain, anyhow.  An apocalypse is the opposite of a dream.  A dream is falser than the outer life.  But the end of the world is more actual than the world it ends.  I don’t say this is really the end of the world, but it’s something like that—­it’s the end of something.  All the people are crowding into one corner.  Everything is coming to a point.”

“What is the point?” asked Turnbull.

“I can’t see it,” said Evan; “it is too large and plain.”

Then after a silence he said:  “I can’t see it—­and yet I will try to describe it.  Turnbull, three days ago I saw quite suddenly that our duel was not right after all.”