with the subject he himself had started. Truth to tell his nerves
had been put distinctly "on edge" by Seaton's cool, calculating and
seemingly callous assertion as to the powers he possessed to
destroy, if he chose, a nation,--and all sorts of uncomfortable
scraps of scientific information gleaned from books and treatises
suggested themselves vividly to his mind at this particular moment
when he would rather have forgotten them. As, for example--"A pound
weight of radio-active energy, if it could be extracted in as short
a time as we pleased, instead of in so many million years, could do
the work of a hundred and fifty tons of dynamite." This agreeable
fact stuck in his brain as a bone may stick in a throat, causing a
sense of congestion. Then the words of one of the "pulpit
thunderers" of New York rolled back on his ears--"This world will be
destroyed, not by the hand of God, but by the wilful and devilish
malingering of Man!" Another pleasant thought! And he felt himself
to be a poor weak fool to even try to put up a girl's beauty, a
girl's love as a barrier to the output of a destroying force
engineered by a terrific human intention,--it was like the old story
of the Scottish heroine who thrust a slender arm through the great
staple of a door to hold back the would-be murderers of a King.

"Beauty does not move him!" she said.

She was right. Nothing was likely to move Roger Seaton from any
purpose he had once resolved upon. What to him was beauty? Merely a
"fortuitous concourse of atoms" moving for a time in one
personality. What was a girl? Just the young "female of the
species"--no more. And love? Sexual attraction, of which there was
enough and too much in Seaton's opinion. And the puzzled Gwent
wondered whether after all he would not have acted more wisely--or