rumpus over nothing. There are men who can be heard a half block if they can not find a cuff-button, but would await the end of the world with equanimity. St. Cloud was something like that a man of remarkable strength in some ways and in others of lamentable and strange weaknesses.
I have often wondered at that mystery of chance which brought these two, Henry Quainfan and Morgan St. Cloud, together these two of all men!
And yet was it' chance? Who can say? Perhaps after all it was Fate. For my part, I can not help thinking that as I look back on the awful drama.
At any rate, Fate must have chuckled, and long too, at the terrible joke. Fate makes no jokes, and laughs at none, that are not terrible.
"If the Almighty had not made her so," as I once heard Draconda say, "she would go mad."
For a time I sat there looking into the flames and thinking. When my eyes turned again to Henry Quainfan it was to find him engrossed in calculations of some sort, computing in that long red note-book which he had with him always.
It was then that the purr of a motor reached my ears. The sound grew swiftly louder. Glancing through one of the windows, I saw the bushes and driveway lighted up, and knew that St. Cloud had come.
In a few minutes he entered. So engrossed, however, was Henry Quainfan in his problem that he remained utterly unaware of St. Cloud's presence in the room.
"Ah, Rider," said St. Cloud, "I thought I'd find you here."
He drew a chair up towards the fire a little and seated himself, his dark look lingering for a few moments on the golden-haired man there in the great rocker, utterly unconscious of St. Cloud, myself -everything save his great problem.
"Dropped in on my way back," went on St. Cloud, "and your man told me you had gone out. Hadn't taken the auto, though, he said, so I knew that you hadn't gone far."
For a time he chatted on, then of a sudden paused and for a little space watched Henry Quainfan.
"In deep," observed St. Cloud, I nodded.
"Doesn't even know I've arrived," said St. Cloud. "He'll soon be as bad as old Sir Isaac chasing the falling moon. Wonder what it is now?"
I shrugged my shoulders.
"Heaven knows. Seems to be some idea, but what it is about is more than I can even guess at."
"Maybe, now," smiled St. Cloud, "he's figuring out how to separate the positive sphere-funny thing that, Rider, that positive sphere-from the atom. He'll probably do it with mathematics. You can prove anything with mathematics, Rider; but the validity of your assumptions-ah, there's the rub."
"But what's that?" I asked.
"What?"
"That thing called a positive sphere."
"No, one knows," St. Cloud told me airily, waving a hand. "Henry was coming to it the other day when you interrupted the lecture."
"But eight hundred trillion times in a second!" I exclaimed,
"Well, it's so, Rider," St. Cloud declared. "And some go even faster. Now, you know me: you know that, when it comes to theories, assumptions, hypotheses, and so on, that I'm from Missouri and yet Science has got Romance knocked into a cocked hat."
"But so much of it, if I may presume to judge, must be sheer guess-work!" I objected. "It is. And worse than that even. But so much of it isn't. Yes, Keats was wrong, all wrong, Rider, poetasters to the contrary notwithstanding."
"Was he?" said I, wondering how.
"He was," nodded St. Cloud. "He declared that Science would kill Fancy, the exact word; but he was wrong, Romance, Imagination-I've forgotten Rider, al wrong, was Keats. Imagination! Good heavens, there is so much imagination that the scientist has a time of it to keep his feet firmly planted on the earth."
"That's precisely what I thought."
"But you don't think it in the right way," he declared.
"If Mr. Scientist would only stay on the earth!" I told him. "But that's just it. He is never satisfied, indeed doesn't seem to be a scientist, until he is mounted on some mathematical or some-other-kind-of Rocinante, galloping down the Milky Way and tilting with cosmic windmills!"
St. Cloud smiled.
"Come back to earth, Rider."
Henry Quainfan, by the way, was still engrossed in his calculations.
"There is something in that, though," St. Cloud admitted. "But all the same, Rider, you are wrong, as wrong as Keats, and I know you'll perdon me-for the 27 same reason."
"But all this theory !" I said. "However, you mentioned a mysterious something called a positive sphere?"
"That too is theory," said St. Cloud. "It isn't that even, but only an hypothesis. How shall I put it, though? Well, when we went to school, we learned in physics that matter was found in three conditions-solid, liquid and gaseous. Didn't we?"
I said we did.
"Well, it isn't. There are four."
"Four!" I exclaimed.
"Four," nodded St. Cloud.
"The fourth is found in the cathode stream- but not only there. The cathode stream doesn't consist of ordinary light, but of particles of matter that are neither solid, liquid nor gaseous."
"Then what on earth are they?"
"Nothing but charges of negative electricity. Those are the electrons or corpuscles. But the problem is simply this: that mysterious sphere which holds the electrons in their orbits is positive electricity, and that has never been separated from atoms of matter. we have seen, the negative has."
"But why on earth should anybody want to separate it?" said I.
"Rider," smiled St. Cloud, "you are as bad as Keats! Why, for one thing, to see what would happen: As Henry remarked the other day, it is there that the great. discoveries of the future lie. The Crookes tube was only a plaything, and yet it gave humanity the X-ray. Much of this wondering and investigating may strike one as being idle, and yet it may unlock many and-who knows-terrible secrets."
At this moment Henry Quainfan looked up. His eyes lingered on St. Cloud with a curious, questioning and yet far-away look in them.
"Back, Morgan?" said he, and it was as though his thoughts were far away. "Back," smiled the dark man. "Back for some time."
"For some time? I'm becoming infernally absent-minded!" absent-minded!" exclaimed Henry Quainfan.
"I was telling Rider you'd soon be as bad as-old Newton."
St. Cloud turned to me.
"Do you know what he did the other day?" I didn't.
"He thought that the mustard-pot was the sugar-bowl!"
St. Cloud laughed.
"You should have seen Buttermore! That's not so bad, though-is it-as that time he went out in the downpour holding a golf club up in the air! Ha, ha, he thought he'd got hold of an umbrella!"
"Laugh away," smiled Henry Quainfan. "But I have an idea that Morgan St. Cloud may do worse than mistake a. golf club for an umbrella before we are done with this."
