"Granted such a force," he went on, "and a machine to generate and direct it, and of what value is the most powerful battle-ship, the most stupendous fort? Mere silly shreds of steel and stone! Why, such an engine might be carried in a single hand, and yet the nation that possessed it could be master of the world!" A dark flush had risen to his pallid cheek, and on the arm of his chair Barbara saw the massive fingers of one huge hand clench and unclench with a furtive, nervous gesture. The sight gave her a sharp sense of recoil as if from the touch of something sinister and evilly suggestive. "No!" said the Ambassador vehemently. "Humanity would revolt. Such a discovery would be worth less than nothing! Its use by any warring nation would call down the execration of civilization, and the man who knew the secret would be too dangerous to be at large!" There was dead silence for a moment. Bersonin sat motionless, staring straight before him. Very slowly the color seemed to fade from his cheek. When he spoke again his voice had regained its dead level of tonelessness. "That has occurred to me," he said. "I think Your Excellency is right. Invention may do its work too well. However--no doubt we speak of scientific impossibilities; let us hope so, at any rate." Barbara pushed the photographs aside and slipped into the next room, closing the door and drawing the heavy portières that hung over it. She had had for a moment a vague, almost childish, sense of shrinking as if from something monstrous and uncanny--such a sensation as the naked diver may have, when, peering through his water-glass, he sees a dim grisly shape glide, stealthy and cold, through the opaque depths. She was growing absurdly fanciful, she thought. She did not turn on the electric light, but threw open one of the long, French windows. There was a new moon and a pale radiance flooded the room, with a sudden odor of wistaria and plum-blossoms. The window gave on to a porch running the length of the house, and this made her think suddenly of home. Yet the air was too humid for California, too moist and rich even for Florida. And suddenly she found herself pitying the people there to whom the East would always be a closed book. Yet how dim and vague Japan had been to her a month before! A grand piano stood open by the window and in the dim light she sat down and let her fingers wander idly in long arpeggios. She could see one side of the Japanese garden, with a glimpse of a tiny dry lake and a pebbled rivulet spanned by an arching bridge of red lacquer. It ended in a sharp, sloping hill covered with shrubbery. On the ridge far above she distinguished the outlines of native houses and flanking them the curved, Tartar-like gables of a gray old temple. Somewhere, beyond that little hill, perhaps, stood the Chapel erected to her father's memory, which she had yet to see. As her fingers strayed over the ivory keys, she thought of him, of his vivid, aberrant career and untimely end.