"There shall be no more wars!--there CAN be none!"
Roger Seaton said these words aloud with defiant emphasis, addressing the dumb sky. It was early morning, but an intense heat had so scorched the earth that not the smallest drop of dew glittered on any leaf or blade of grass; it was all arid, brown and burned into a dryness as of fever. But Seaton was far too much engrossed with himself and his own business to note the landscape, or to be troubled by the suffocating closeness of the atmosphere,--he stood gazing with the idolatry of a passionate lover at a small, plain metal case, containing a dozen or more small plain metal cylinders, as small as women's thimbles, all neatly ranged side by side, divided from contact with one another by folded strips of cotton.
"There it is!" he went on, apostrophising the still air--"Complete,--perfected! If I sold that to any nation under the sun, that nation could rule the world!--could wipe out everything save itself and its own people! I have wrested the secret from the very womb of Nature!--it is mine--all mine! I would have given it to Britain--or to the United States--but neither will accept my terms--so therefore I hold it--I, only!--which is just as well! I--just I--am master of destiny!--the Power we call God, has put this tiling into my hands! What a marvel and shall I not use it? I will! Let Germany but stir an inch towards aggression, and Germany shall exist no longer!--The same with any other nation that starts a quarrel--I--I alone will settle it!"
His eyes blazed with the light of fanaticism--he was obsessed by the force of his own ideas and schemes, and the metal case on the table before him was, to his mind, time, life, present and future. He had arrived at that questionable point of intellectual attainment when man forgets that there is any existing force capable of opposing him, and imagines that he has but to go on in his own way to grasp all worlds and the secrets of their being. At this juncture, so often arrived at by many, a kind of super-sureness sets in, persuading the finite nature that it has reached the infinite. The whole mental organisation of the man thrilled with an awful consciousness of power. He said within himself "I hold the lives of millions at my mercy!"
Other thoughts--other dreams had passed away for the moment--he had forgotten life as it presents itself to the ordinary human being. Now and again a flitting vision of Morgana vaguely troubled him,--her intellectual capacity annoyed him, and yet he would have been glad to discuss with her the scientific unfolding of his great secret--she would understand it in all its bearings,--she might advise--Advice!--no!--he did not need the advice of a woman! As for Manella, he had not seen her since her last violent outburst of what he called "temper"--and he had no wish for her presence. For now he had a thing to do which was of paramount importance,--and this was, to deposit the treasured discovery of his life in a secret hiding-place he had found for it, till he should be ready to remove it to safer quarters--or--TILL HE RESOLVED TO USE IT.