"Shut up or I'll gag you both!" imperiously commanded the doctor, as the wheels of the ambulance cut the pebbly road. They were entering the asylum; now they passed the porter's lodge. In the jewelled light of a senescent moon, his wife and little daughter gazed at them curiously, without semblance of pity or fear. Then, as if shot from the same vocal spring-board, the voices of poet and painter merged into crazy rhythmatic chanting:—
"Rebels of the moon, rebels of the moon! We are, we are, the rebels of the moon!"
And the great gates closed behind them with a brazen clangour—metal gates of the moon-rebels.
V
THE SPIRAL ROAD
There can be nothing good, as we know it, nor anything evil, as we know it, in the eye of the Omnipresent and the Omniscient.—Oriental Proverb.