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"There shall be no er Seaton said these words aloud with defiant e, but an intense heat had so scorched the earth that not the srass; it was all arid, brown and burned into a dryness as of fever But Seaton was far too rossed with himself and his own business to note the landscape, or to be troubled by the suffocating closeness of the at with the idolatry of a passionate lover at a s a dozen or more small plain ed side by side, divided from contact with one another by folded strips of cotton

"There it is!" he went on, apostrophising the still air--"Complete,--perfected! If I sold that to any nation under the sun, that nation could rule the world!--could wipe out everything save itself and its own people! I have wrested the secret from the very woiven it to Britain--or to the United States--but neither will accept my terms--so therefore I hold it--I, only!--which is just as well! I--just I--aminto my hands! What a marvel and shall I not use it? I will! Let Gerression, and Gerer!--The same with any other nation that starts a quarrel--I--I alone will settle it!"

His eyes blazed with the light of fanaticism--he was obsessed by the force of his own ideas and schemes, and the metal case on the table before him was, to his mind, time, life, present and future He had arrived at that questionable point of intellectual attain force capable of opposing hirasp all worlds and the secrets of their being At this juncture, so often arrived at bythe finite nature that it has reached the infinite The whole anisation of the man thrilled with an awful consciousness of power He said within himself "I hold the lives of hts--other dreaotten life as it presents itself to the ordinary huuely troubled him,--her intellectual capacity annoyed hilad to discuss with her the scientific unfolding of his great secret--she would understand it in all its bearings,--she ht advise--Advice!--no!--he did not need the advice of a woman! As for Manella, he had not seen her since her last violent outburst of what he called "temper"--and he had no wish for her presence For now he had a thing to do which was of paramount importance,--and this was, to deposit the treasured discovery of his life in a secret hiding-place he had found for it, till he should be ready to remove it to safer quarters--or--TILL HE RESOLVED TO USE IT