* * * * *

Clifford Matheson had set himself from the age of eighteen to achieve a
money success. At thirty-seven, he had achieved it. He had slashed out
for himself a path to power in the financial world. He was rich enough
to satisfy the desires of most men.

Five years ago he had married into a well-known English family, and the
doors of society had been opened wide to him. But his marriage had been
a ghastly mistake. Olive, after marriage, had showed herself entirely
out of sympathy with the idealism that formed so large a part of the
complex character of her husband. She wanted money and power, and she
drove spurs into her husband that he might obtain for her more and more
money, more and more power. Any other ambition in Clifford she tried to
sneer down with the ruthlessness of an utterly mercenary woman.

He had come to loathe the sensuous artificiality of his life. He had
come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick with the
callousness of that stratum of the world in which he moved.

In the last couple of years he had found himself drawn powerfully
towards the calm, passionless atmosphere of science in which his elder
brother, John Rivière, had found his life-work. Rivière had made no
worldly success for himself. The scientific researches he had undertaken
made no stir when they found light in the pages of obscure quarterlies
circulating amongst a few dozen other men engaged in similar research.
Rivière had not the temperament to push himself or the children of his
brain. He had settled into a solitary bachelor life in a small Canadian
college--an unknown, unrecognized man--and yet the calm, steady purpose
and the calm, passionless happiness of the life had made a deep