Within a few feet of him at one corner of the square of standing people stood the girl he had known in Jersey, Madeleine Durand.  She looked straight at him with a steady smile which lit up the scene of darkness and unreason like the light of some honest fireside.  Her square face and throat were thrown back, as her habit was, and there was something almost sleepy in the geniality of her eyes.  He saw her first, and for a few seconds saw her only; then the outer edge of his eyesight took in all the other staring faces, and he saw all the faces he had ever seen for weeks and months past.  There was the Tolstoyan in Jaeger flannel, with the yellow beard that went backward and the foolish nose and eyes that went forward, with the curiosity of a crank.  He was talking eagerly to Mr. Gordon, the corpulent Jew shopkeeper whom they had once gagged in his own shop.  There was the tipsy old Hertfordshire rustic; he was talking energetically to himself.  There was not only Mr. Vane the magistrate, but the clerk of Mr. Vane, the magistrate.  There was not only Miss Drake of the motor-car, but also Miss Drake’s chauffeur.  Nothing wild or unfamiliar could have produced upon Turnbull such a nightmare impression as that ring of familiar faces.  Yet he had one intellectual shock which was greater than all the others.  He stepped impulsively forward towards Madeleine, and then wavered with a kind of wild humility.  As he did so he caught sight of another square face behind Madeleine’s, a face with long grey whiskers and an austere stare.  It was old Durand, the girls’ father; and when Turnbull saw him he saw the last and worst marvel of that monstrous night.  He remembered Durand; he remembered his monotonous, everlasting lucidity, his stupefyingly sensible views of everything, his colossal contentment with truisms merely because they were true.  “Confound it all!” cried Turnbull to himself, “if he is in the asylum, there can’t be anyone outside.”  He drew nearer to Madeleine, but still doubtfully and all the more so because she still smiled at him.  MacIan had already gone across to Beatrice with an air of fright.

Then all these bewildered but partly amicable recognitions were cloven by a cruel voice which always made all human blood turn bitter.  The Master was standing in the middle of the room surveying the scene like a great artist looking at a completed picture.  Handsome as he looked, they had never seen so clearly what was really hateful in his face; and even then they could only express it by saying that the arched brows and the long emphatic chin gave it always a look of being lit from below, like the face of some infernal actor.

“This is indeed a cosy party,” he said, with glittering eyes.

The Master evidently meant to say more, but before he could say anything M. Durand had stepped right up to him and was speaking.

He was speaking exactly as a French bourgeois speaks to the manager of a restaurant.  That is, he spoke with rattling and breathless rapidity, but with no incoherence, and therefore with no emotion.  It was a steady, monotonous vivacity, which came not seemingly from passion, but merely from the reason having been sent off at a gallop.  He was saying something like this: