re in the laboratory of a tumbledown villa in Neuilly in order t

nancier, and as John Rivière the recluse scientist. He had chosen to take up the n

ized 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 t

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 ma

s office on the Rue Laffitte. He had failed to realize that a man might be as eager to give as to grasp. He ha

up to worldly success from a clerk's stool in a Montreal broker's office, who had made himself a power in t

mprobable, that he might have committed suicide. Which it was, mattered nothing to the shipowner. But he did

ss. At thirty-seven, he had achieved it. He had slashed out for himself a path to p

had showed herself entirely out of sympathy with the idealism that formed so large a part of the complex character of her husband. She wanted money and power, and she drove spurs into he

d come to loathe the ruthless selfishness of finance. He was sick w

tific researches he had undertaken made no stir when they found light in the pages of obscure quarterlies circulating amongst a few dozen other men engaged in similar research. Rivière had not the temperament to push himself or the children of

holiday with his brother in the wilds of no

s studies, an idea had developed which could only be worked out by experiments. Many years of patient research would be needed, fo

aspect of its myriad effects on the highly complex human being. It was as though one were to attempt to understand the subtleties

to that of the doctors. He wanted to know the elementary grammar of human disease. He found that no book dealt with it-nor attempted to deal with it. No recognized d

ing made on the problem of causes. But nothing strong-planned-as any one of his financial schemes would be planned-nothing co-o

and to give to the w

ons of life on the lowest living organisms-the microscopic blobs of life whose structure is elemental. From his wide reading of the last couple of years, he knew what little was alr

o man. What could be learnt from the pathological condition of an am?ba might lay the foundations for the conquering of cancer in man, and a hundred other diseases

an might well devote his wh

villa on the outskirts of Neuilly. In it he had fitted up a research laboratory in whi

rice, and without asking any but the most perfunctory questions of the man who had offered to buy. In the solitude of the ruined villa, Matheson had been pursuing his scientific research at such times as he could snatch from his financial business.

from the calls of his business, there were the insistent demands of his wife. The position was becoming an intole

f decision to a head. He had grappled with it in his office, pacing to and fro long after the shipowner had left. He had turned his steps

son was a man of considerable strength and alertness. He had felled one of the two apaches with his heavy gold-mounted stick; the other one had sent

vivid inspiration for the sol

phone information about them to the police or to a newspaper. That knife-slit in his overcoat would be taken as evidence of murder. They would judge him murdered, with robb

he solution of hi

ney already standing in the name of Rivière at a Paris bank to give him a m

d be the gainer; and mankind, he hoped, would be the gainer th

s assuredly