It was late the previous night that the thing had occurred to him. He’d been sitting where Mrs. Temple last saw him, all hope gone, crushed, stunned, overcome. All at once, without warning, he found himself standing erect and with a plan or conception in his mind which promised, on its first occurring to him, to be something which would certainly turn defeat into victory. The central idea of the thing, with its most extraordinary possibilities for profit, came to him as a whole, and from that he began rapidly to develop it. For nearly an hour he stood there intensely occupied with this, feeling positive that he had something which would enable him to save the life of the one so dear to him. Toward the end of that time the vital necessity for secrecy began to dawn on him and then to rise rapidly into tremendous importance, until he suddenly came to the realization that it was at the basis of everything—that without it the invention would be valueless—so much junk. He decided at once to build a room in the basement where the device could be constructed without the slightest danger that knowledge of its purpose or mechanism would leak out. Bars and padlocks. Timbers from the old barn back of the house. Almost before he knew what he was doing he found himself out there with hammer and chisel and cross-cut saw. He took the lamp that Mrs. Temple had left lighted on the table, and drove at the business frantically. Time—time—time! The doctors said delay might turn the scales against her. In a couple of hours he had enough timber ripped off and dragged to the basement to begin on, and at it he went, startling Mrs. Temple—of whose presence in the house he was unaware—out of a sound sleep. Working with the same desperate drive all the next day and well into the succeeding night, he had the small room entirely planked-up by two in the morning, the partitions build up solid to the floor joists of the room above. He was at it again the morning following, and Mrs. Temple knew from the muffling of the sound, as she heard it in the kitchen, that he had now closed himself into the new room and was working inside.