Trafford surveyed the place; it seemed to him to have shrunken a little in the course of the three years that had intervened since he resigned his position. On the wall at the back there still hung, fly-blown and a little crumpled, an old table of constants he had made for his elasticity researches. Lake had kept it there, for Lake was a man of generous appreciations, and rather proud to follow in the footsteps of an investigator of Trafford's subtlety and vigor. The old sink in the corner where Trafford had once swilled his watch glasses and filled his beakers had been replaced by one of a more modern construction, and the combustion cupboard was unfamiliar, until Durgan pointed out that it had been enlarged. The ground-glass window at the east end showed still the marks of an explosion that had banished a clumsy student from this sanctuary at the very beginning of Trafford's career. "By Jove!" he said after a silence, "but I did some good work here." "You did, sir," said Durgan. "I wonder--I may take it up again presently." "I doubt it, sir," said Durgan. "Oh! But suppose I come back?" "I don't think you would find yourself coming back, sir," said Durgan after judicious consideration. He adduced no shadow of a reason for his doubt, but some mysterious quality in his words carried conviction to Trafford's mind. He knew that he would never do anything worth doing in molecular physics again. He knew it now conclusively for the first time. § 4 He found himself presently in Bond Street. The bright May day had brought out great quantities of people, so that he had to come down from altitudes of abstraction to pick his way among them. He was struck by the prevailing interest and contentment in the faces he passed. There was no sense of insecurity betrayed, no sense of the deeps and mysteries upon which our being floats like a film. They looked solid, they looked satisfied; surely never before in the history of the world has there been so great a multitude of secure-feeling, satisfied-looking, uninquiring people as there is to-day. All the tragic great things of life seem stupendously remote from them; pain is rare, death is out of sight, religion has shrunken to an inconsiderable, comfortable, reassuring appendage of the daily life. And with the bright small things of immediacy they are so active and alert. Never before has the world seen such multitudes, and a day must come when it will cease to see them for evermore.