“The head of the asylum has settled it all,” said Dr. Quayle, still looking down.
MacIan took one of his immense strides forward and stood over the doctor with flaming eyes.
“If the head has settled it let the head announce it,” he said. “I won't take it from you. I believe you to be a low, gibbering degenerate. Let us see the head of the asylum.”
“See the head of the asylum,” repeated Dr. Quayle. “Certainly not.”
The tall Highlander, bending over him, put one hand on his shoulder with fatherly interest.
“You don't seem to appreciate the peculiar advantages of my position as a lunatic,” he said. “I could kill you with my left hand before such a rat as you could so much as squeak. And I wouldn't be hanged for it.”
“I certainly agree with Mr. MacIan,” said Turnbull with sobriety and perfect respectfulness, “that you had better let us see the head of the institution.”
Dr. Quayle got to his feet in a mixture of sudden hysteria and clumsy presence of mind.
“Oh, certainly,” he said with a weak laugh. “You can see the head of the asylum if you particularly want to.” He almost ran out of the room, and the two followed swiftly on his flying coat tails. He knocked at an ordinary varnished door in the corridor. When a voice said, “Come in,” MacIan's breath went hissing back through his teeth into his chest. Turnbull was more impetuous, and opened the door.
It was a neat and well-appointed room entirely lined with a medical library. At the other end of it was a ponderous and polished desk with an incandescent lamp on it, the light of which was just sufficient to show a slender, well-bred figure in an ordinary medical black frock-coat, whose head, quite silvered with age, was bent over neat piles of notes. This gentleman looked up for an instant as they entered, and the lamplight fell on his glittering spectacles and long, clean-shaven face—a face which would have been simply like an aristocrat's but that a certain lion poise of the head and long cleft in the chin made it look more like a very handsome actor's. It was only for a flash that his face was thus lifted. Then he bent his silver head over his notes once more, and said, without looking up again: