th's story had laid hold of my imagination like one small, intense
picture of tropical sunshine hung on a wall of grey business affairs.
I kept it going during Gordon-Nasmyth's intermittent appearances in
England. Every now and then he and I would meet and reinforce its
effect. We would lunch in London, or he would cone to see my gliders at
Crest Hill, and make new projects for getting at those heaps again now
with me, now alone.

At times they became a sort of fairy-story with us, an imaginative
exercise. And there came Capern's discovery of what he called the ideal
filament and with it an altogether less problematical quality about the
business side of quap. For the ideal filament needed five per cent. of
canadium, and canadium was known to the world only as a newly separated
constituent of a variety of the rare mineral rutile. But to Thorold it
was better known as an element in a mysterious sample brought to him
by me, and to me it was known as one of the elements in quap. I told
my uncle, and we jumped on to the process at once. We found that
Gordon-Nasmyth, still unaware of the altered value of the stuff, and
still thinking of the experimental prices of radium and the rarity
value of cerium, had got hold of a cousin named Pollack, made some
extraordinary transaction about his life insurance policy, and was
buying a brig. We put in, put down three thousand pounds, and forthwith
the life insurance transaction and the Pollack side of this finance
vanished into thin air, leaving Pollack, I regret to say, in the brig
and in the secret--except so far as canadium and the filament went--as
residuum. We discussed earnestly whether we should charter a steamer or
go on with the brig, but we decided on the brig as a less conspicuous
instrument for an enterprise that was after all, to put it plainly,
stealing.

But that was one of our last enterprises before our great crisis, and I
will tell of it in its place.

So it was quap came into our affairs, came in as a fairy-tale and became
real. More and more real it grew until at last it was real, until at
last I saw with my eyes the heaps my imagination had seen for so long,
and felt between my fingers again that half-gritty, half soft texture
of quap, like sanded moist-sugar mixed with clay in which there stirs
something--

One must feel it to understand.

V

All sorts of things came to the Hardingham and offered themselves to my
uncle. Gordon-Nasmyth stands but only becau