*

He laughed excitedly.

"You'll see, you'll see! No, I'm not in love. And I want you to help,
and not admire. There are only Carson and myself here, you know, and the
job's too big for the two of us." He hurried me across the broad
concrete porch and into the house. "Throw the cap anywhere and come
on!"

Too much amazed to comment further, I followed my friend. This was a
Warren Mercer I did not know. Usually his clean-cut, olive-tinted face
was a polite mask that seldom showed even the slightest trace of
emotion. His eyes, dark and large, smiled easily, and shone with
interest, but his almost beautiful mouth, beneath the long slim
mustache, always closely cropped, seldom smiled with his eyes.

But it was his present excited speech that amazed me most. Mercer,
during all the years I had known him, had never been moved before to
such tempestuous outbursts of enthusiasm. It was his habit to speak
slowly and thoughtfully, in his low, musical voice; even in the midst of
our hottest arguments, and we had had many of them, his voice had never
lost its calm, unhurried gentleness.

To my surprise, instead of leading the way to the really comfortable,
although rather gaudy living room, Mercer turned to the left, towards
what had been the billiard room, and was now his laboratory.

The laboratory, brilliantly illuminated, was littered, as usual, with
apparatus of every description. Along one wall were the retorts, scales,
racks, hoods and elaborate set-ups, like the articulated glass and
rubber bones of some weird prehistoric monster, that demonstrated
Mercer's taste for this branch of science. On the other side of the room
a corresponding workbench was littered with a tangle of coils,
transformers, meters, tools and instruments, and at the end of the
room, behind high black control panels, with gleaming bus-bars and
staring, gaping meters, a pair of generators hummed softly. The other
end of the room was nearly all glass, and opened onto the patio and the
swimming pool.

* * * * *

Mercer paused a moment, with his hand on the knob of the door, a strange
light in his dark eyes.

"Now you'll see why I called you here," he said tensely. "You can judge
for yourself whether the trip was worth while. Here she is!"

With a gesture he flung open the door, and I stared, following his
glance, down at the great tiled swimming pool.

It is difficult for me to describe the scene. The patio