"'I've been eavesdropping,' he said. Lord! I was scared. How much had I given away? 'I don't know anything about this subject,' he said. 'But I've an idea you do. Anyhow, I'm willing to gamble on it. My name's Pearmain,' he said, and he showed me the signature on a cheque. 'A thousand pounds to start you.' He laid the cheque down on the little table among the matches and cigar-ends. 'You can let me know when you need more,' he said. He fished a card out of an inside pocket, and chucked it on top of the cheque. Naturally I was staggered. He _seemed_ right enough in his head, but I was sure he couldn't be.... When Hawkins came back I introduced him. We talked awhile longer. Then the old man said good-night. The next day I cashed the cheque. I gave up my post in the hospital, and I gave up ... a lot of things. After that I invested every ounce of energy I had in this undertaking. For three solid years I've done nothing, thought about nothing, except the one thing." His eyes were shining as a lover's might, I thought. The sting of jealousy poisoned my pleasure in being taken into his confidence--a renewed antagonism to the work, work, always work, that made its triumphant claim. "You pretend to be more inhuman than you are," I said. "For you don't forget that you can help people who have only ordinary everyday troubles." "Oh, yes, I do," he laughed. "I'll have nothing to do with ordinary, everyday troubles." "You helped us----" "Oh, that's different--an exception. Just for once...." He seemed to excuse himself, for wasting time on us. He said the most extravagant things. "A revolution might have swept England. I should have gone on attenuating serums and inoculating guinea-pigs." It may have been something in my manner, or just my silence, that pulled him up. He spoke of the share we at Duncombe had had in "what's happened." "When I was clean worked out and dead-beat, I came here." We hadn't any notion of the "rest and refreshment--the----" He looked at me out of those clear red-brown eyes of his, and seemed to deliberate. A sense of delicious panic seized me. "And--the--the experiments. How do they come on?" I asked, but I wasn't thinking of them at all. "That," he said, sinking his voice--"that's just what I'm coming to; though I hoped I shouldn't tell you. I didn't mean to say anything at all this morning, except that I was going to be a hermit for these next days. But you aren't a chatterbox. The fact is ... last night I believe I stumbled on the secret." I don't know what I said, but it pleased him. His eyes were full of gentle brilliancy. "Yes, yes," he said. "I knew _you'd_ understand." Oh, it was good to see him with that light in his face! And we sat there, with the morning sun shining over us, and just looked gladness at each other. Then I said I thought he must be the happiest man in England.