Arthur Dean could only send a frantic wire to Lars Larssen, and the
liner had cast off from her moorings before an answer came. This is what
the shipowner found awaiting him at his hotel:--

"Mrs M. wants to know where is Rivière. Reply urgent. Who is Rivière?"




CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE


On the morning of March 15th, Clifford Matheson lit a blazing fire in
the laboratory of a tumbledown villa in Neuilly in order to destroy the
clothes and other identity marks of the financier.

For some months past he had been leading a double life--as Clifford
Matheson the financier, and as John Rivière the recluse scientist. He
had chosen to take up the name of his dead half-brother because he had
been taking up the latter's life-work.

The motives that had urged him to this strange double life were such as
a Lars Larssen could scarcely comprehend. Every man has his mental as
well as his physical limitations. The keenest brain, if trained on some
specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many
lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind,
had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been
trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External