en had made no mention of this
name. It was the one facet of the situation of which the shipowner knew
nothing--the one unknown link in the chain of circumstance.

Arthur Dean could only send a frantic wire to Lars Larssen, and the
liner had cast off from her moorings before an answer came. This is what
the shipowner found awaiting him at his hotel:--

"Mrs M. wants to know where is Riviere. Reply urgent. Who is Riviere?"

CHAPTER VI

THE BEGINNING OF A NEW LIFE

On the morning of March 15th, Clifford Matheson lit a blazing fire in
the laboratory of a tumbledown villa in Neuilly in order to destroy the
clothes and other identity marks of the financier.

For some months past he had been leading a double life--as Clifford
Matheson the financier, and as John Riviere the recluse scientist. He
had chosen to take up the name of his dead half-brother because he had
been taking up the latter's life-work.

The motives that had urged him to this strange double life were such as
a Lars Larssen could scarcely comprehend. Every man has his mental as
well as his physical limitations. The keenest brain, if trained on some
specialized line, will fail to understand what to the dabbler in many
lines seems perfectly natural and reasonable. Larssen, a master-mind,
had his peculiar limitations as well as smaller men. His brain had been
trained to see the world as an ant-heap into which some Power External
had stamped an iron heel. The ants fought blindly with one another to
reach the surface--to live. That was the law of life as he saw it--to
fight one's way to the open.

The world he looked upon breathed in money through eager nostrils.
Money was the oxygen of civilization. Without money a man slowly
asphyxiated. It must be every man's ambition to own big money--to
breathe it in himself with full-lunged, lustful, intoxicating gulps, and
to dole it out as master to dependents pleading for their ration of
life. That was the meaning of power: to give or withhold the essentials
of life at one's pleasure.

Consequently he had failed to read the riddle of Matheson's motive at
that crucial interview in the financier's office on the Rue Laffitte. He
had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp.
He had failed to reckon on altruism as a possible dominating factor in
the decisions of a successful man of business.

Further than that, it lay entirely outside Lars Larssen's plane of
thought that a man who ha