It was a rich pleasure to note every detail of the room--the sagging couch, the shabby coat hanging against the wall, the table laden with dust, bottles and tobacco boxes, the long bench, on the lower shelf of which was ranged, with astonishing order, a multitude of tools. She drew a contented sigh. The sun poured through the skylight and twinkled on the brass-work of his darling inventions, enthroned behind the glass of an old bookcase. Even while he slept, they peered out at him, these children of his active brain. And in every corner some mechanism was revealed, some cunning, complicated thing of joints and prisms. Rachel completed her inventory, then her brows suddenly rose and her eyes with involuntary devotion fixed themselves upon Emil. It was as if she had saved him until the last for a closer inspection, like a little girl who reserves her chief treasure for a leisurely examination. Seated on a high stool, before a bench, he was at work, from his head covered with its thick mane, the eyes burning beneath like coals, down to his big feet, planted against a convenient shelf. These feet hinted at a force in him that urged him to make a rift in the wall of the Unknown. She remained for a long time motionless. Then with a smile, unfathomable in its freshness, its terror, its confusion, she turned away. There, rises a mountain peak--in silence, clouds, eternal snows! The sun beats on the snow and the sparkling snow responds to the light. There is the laboratory of genius! From the mountain roll downward, sometimes small streamlets, sometimes mighty rivers. These streamlets and rivers nourish the valley below and even the cities out on the plain, these rivers nourish the world. Yet the trees and shrubs at the base of the mountain suffer, for sometimes instead of refreshing streamlets, avalanches of snow come down. At such times the bushes and trees cling together; with their twisted branches and denuded roots, they whisper and moan execrations on the mountain. Close to the summit--in order to observe what is taking place there--its foot in the snow and its head in the clouds, pushes that imperturbable and daring little flower, the edelweiss. Rachel climbed close to heaven in order to have sight of her love. CHAPTER III THE CONFESSION One June morning in the second year of the existence of The St. Ives and Hart Company, Emil entered his wife's room. In order to be in range of the draught from the window, Annie had pulled forward a couch. Clothed in a shabby wrapper, open at the neck, she was curled up languidly with her head on a cushion. Emil gazed at her while something like compunction blazed up in his eyes. He amazed her by sitting down by her side and drawing her to his breast. Holding her two tiny hands in one of his own, he caressed her hair and even drew a pitying finger over the prominent cords of her poor little throat. Then he strained her to him, sighing as if from a full heart.