but Roland Clewe
was not satisfied, even though many of his inventions and machines
were much nearer completion than he had expected to find them. The work
necessary to be done in his lens-house before he could go on with the
great work of his life was not yet finished.

As well as he could judge, it would be a month or two before he could
devote himself to those labors in his lens-house the thought of which
had so long filled his mind by day, and even during his sleep.

CHAPTER III. MARGARET RALEIGH

After breakfast the-following morning Roland Clewe mounted his horse and
rode over to a handsome house which stood upon a hill about a mile and
a half from Sardis. Horses, which had almost gone out of use during the
first third of the century, were now getting to be somewhat in fashion
again. Many people now appreciated the pleasure which these animals had
given to the world since the beginning of history, and whose place, in
an aesthetic sense, no inanimate machine could supply. As Roland Clewe
swung himself from the saddle at the foot of a broad flight of steps,
the house door was opened and a lady appeared.

"I saw you coming!" she exclaimed, running down the steps to meet him.

She was a handsome woman, inclined to be tall, and some five years
younger than Clewe. This was Mrs. Margaret Raleigh, partner with Roland
Clewe in the works at Sardis, and, in fact, the principal owner of that
great estate. She was a widow, and her husband had been not only a man
of science, but a very rich man; and when he died, at the outset of
his career, his widow believed it her duty to devote his fortune to the
prosecution and development of scientific works. She knew Roland Clewe
as a hard student and worker, as a man of brilliant and original ideas,
and as the originator of schemes which, if carried out successfully,
would place him among the great inventors of the world.

She was not a scientific woman in the strict sense of the word, but she
had a most thorough and appreciative sympathy with all forms of physical
research, and there was a distinctiveness and grandeur in the aims
towards which Roland Clewe had directed his life work which determined
her to unite, with all the power of her money and her personal
encouragement, in the labors he had set for himself.

Therefore it was that the main part of the fortune left by Herbert
Raleigh had been invested in the shops and foundries at Sardis, and that
Roland Clewe and Mar