Their eccentric host had vanished from sight, with a polite gesture, some twenty minutes before.  They imagined him to be occupied on some concerns in the interior of the house, and they waited for his emergence, stamping the garden in silence—­the garden of tall, fresh country flowers, in the midst of which the monstrous South Sea idol lifted itself as abruptly as the prow of a ship riding on a sea of red and white and gold.

It was with a start, therefore, that they came upon the man himself already in the garden.  They were all the more startled because of the still posture in which they found him.  He was on his knees in front of the stone idol, rigid and motionless, like a saint in a trance or ecstasy.  Yet when Turnbull’s tread broke a twig, he was on his feet in a flash.

“Excuse me,” he said with an irradiation of smiles, but yet with a kind of bewilderment.  “So sorry...family prayers...old fashioned...mother’s knee.  Let us go on to the lawn behind.”

And he ducked rapidly round the statue to an open space of grass on the other side of it.

“This will do us best, Mr. MacIan,” said he.  Then he made a gesture towards the heavy stone figure on the pedestal which had now its blank and shapeless back turned towards them.  “Don’t you be afraid,” he added, “he can still see us.”

MacIan turned his blue, blinking eyes, which seemed still misty with sleep (or sleeplessness) towards the idol, but his brows drew together.

The little man with the long hair also had his eyes on the back view of the god.  His eyes were at once liquid and burning, and he rubbed his hands slowly against each other.

“Do you know,” he said, “I think he can see us better this way.  I often think that this blank thing is his real face, watching, though it cannot be watched.  He! he!  Yes, I think he looks nice from behind.  He looks more cruel from behind, don’t you think?”

“What the devil is the thing?” asked Turnbull gruffly.

“It is the only Thing there is,” answered the other.  “It is Force.”

“Oh!” said Turnbull shortly.

“Yes, my friends,” said the little man, with an animated countenance, fluttering his fingers in the air, “it was no chance that led you to this garden; surely it was the caprice of some old god, some happy, pitiless god.  Perhaps it was his will, for he loves blood; and on that stone in front of him men have been butchered by hundreds in the fierce, feasting islands of the South.  In this cursed, craven place I have not been permitted to kill men on his altar.  Only rabbits and cats, sometimes.”

In the stillness MacIan made a sudden movement, unmeaning apparently, and then remained rigid.

“But today, today,” continued the small man in a shrill voice.  “Today his hour is come.  Today his will is done on earth as it is in heaven.  Men, men, men will bleed before him today.”  And he bit his forefinger in a kind of fever.