Turnbull seemed to frown and flinch for a moment.  “It does not much matter what you call it,” he said, “so long as you keep out of its way.”

The bushes broke and snapped abruptly behind them, and a very tall figure towered above Turnbull with an arrogant stoop and a projecting chin, a chin of which the shape showed queerly even in its shadow upon the path.

“You see that is not so easy,” said MacIan between his teeth.

They looked up into the eyes of the Master, but looked only for a moment.  The eyes were full of a frozen and icy wrath, a kind of utterly heartless hatred.  His voice was for the first time devoid of irony.  There was no more sarcasm in it than there is in an iron club.

“You will be inside the building in three minutes,” he said, with pulverizing precision, “or you will be fired on by the artillery at all the windows.  There is too much talking in this garden; we intend to close it.  You will be accommodated indoors.”

“Ah!” said MacIan, with a long and satisfied sigh, “then I was right.”

And he turned his back and walked obediently towards the building.  Turnbull seemed to canvass for a few minutes the notion of knocking the Master down, and then fell under the same almost fairy fatalism as his companion.  In some strange way it did seem that the more smoothly they yielded, the more swiftly would events sweep on to some great collision.

XX.  DIES IRAE

As they advanced towards the asylum they looked up at its rows on rows of windows, and understood the Master’s material threat.  By means of that complex but concealed machinery which ran like a network of nerves over the whole fabric, there had been shot out under every window-ledge rows and rows of polished-steel cylinders, the cold miracles of modern gunnery.  They commanded the whole garden and the whole country-side, and could have blown to pieces an army corps.

This silent declaration of war had evidently had its complete effect.  As MacIan and Turnbull walked steadily but slowly towards the entrance hall of the institution, they could see that most, or at least many, of the patients had already gathered there as well as the staff of doctors and the whole regiment of keepers and assistants.  But when they entered the lamp-lit hall, and the high iron door was clashed to and locked behind them, yet a new amazement leapt into their eyes, and the stalwart Turnbull almost fell.  For he saw a sight which was indeed, as MacIan had said—­either the Day of Judgement or a dream.