justified. But even the cheerful inner life of a logician may be
upset by a lunatic asylum, to say nothing of whiffs of memory
from a lady in Jersey, and the little red-bearded man on this
windy evening was in a dangerous frame of mind.

Plain and positive as he was, the influence of earth and sky may
have been greater on him than he imagined; and the weather that
walked the world at that moment was as red and angry as Turnbull.
Long strips and swirls of tattered and tawny cloud were dragged
downward to the west exactly as torn red raiment would be
dragged. And so strong and pitiless was the wind that it whipped
away fragments of red-flowering bushes or of copper beech, and
drove them also across the garden, a drift of red leaves, like
the leaves of autumn, as in parody of the red and driven rags of
cloud.

There was a sense in earth and heaven as of everything breaking
up, and all the revolutionist in Turnbull rejoiced that it was
breaking up. The trees were breaking up under the wind, even in
the tall strength of their bloom: the clouds were breaking up and
losing even their large heraldic shapes. Shards and shreds of
copper cloud split off continually and floated by themselves, and
for some reason the truculent eye of Turnbull was attracted to
one of these careering cloudlets, which seemed to him to career
in an exaggerated manner. Also it kept its shape, which is
unusual with clouds shaken off; also its shape was of an odd
sort.

Turnbull continued to stare at it, and in a little time occurred
that crucial instant when a thing, however incredible, is