nes. Hidden mines! He's got them! That's
so! You can take my word! It's no good looking for them, no one will
ever find them but himself, and he thinks of nothing else. But if he
fell in love with YOU---"

She gave a hopeless gesture.

"He will not--he thinks nothing of me--nothing!--no!--though he says I
am beautiful!"

"Oh, he says that, does he?" and Gwent smiled--"Well, he'd be a fool if
he didn't!"

"Ah, but he does not care for beauty!" Manella went on. "He sees it and
he smiles at it, but it does not move him!"

Gwent looked at her in perplexity, not knowing quite how to deal 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 diplomatically--in accepting Seaton's proposal to
part with his