Romney felt the sweat start from his brow and throat. Sleep was farther and farther away. When his head started to work at a pitch like this—it had to wear itself out, a process requiring many hours.... The plan would stop war, but the Japanese nation would pay the price in extermination. The strike would come possibly before the soldiers took the field; agents of the Big Three would start to distribute infections among the crowded myriads of Japanese, among women and children—typhus, yellow fever, cholera, bubonic plague.... A few hundred of agents might ravage the entire island in a night’s work, and that which they carried would require no more space than a surgeon’s bag. Was this what Dr. Ti Kung called using mind instead of muscle? There would be no heavy war engines—no noise, no reek of powder, no twelve-mile projectiles. That was innocent boys’ play. Taking a citadel with charges of infantry under the cover of silencing batteries—a mere sport of picked sides! ... Yet this thought held him: In the greater economy of civilisation and the future of mankind, was it not a fair price to pay—to sacrifice one nation for the elimination forever of the international curse? Romney smiled. He could see it, but acting on it was out of his dimension. When it came to putting even a spy out of business, he had quailed.... Hours passed, sleep coming no nearer. Once he lost himself in the possibilities of waging war upon the country of an enemy by means of spies alone. Every power had great systems of espionage at work in all rival centres—enough to ravage the land of an enemy with plague. Nations would have to protect themselves from each other by the establishment of an unalterable peace. There was a lift to the vision, but carrying baneful cultures of epidemic was no job for one Romney. Sorting the pastils—not for him. ... The room was breathless. At intervals from the hall he heard the creak of a board, as of some one’s slow weight pressed upon it; and twice he tiptoed to the window imagining at least that he heard the soft pad of a native foot on the iron balcony. After the second glance into the outer darkness, he shot the casement bolt, and the stuffy smell of the Chinese house thickened. Toward morning he really tried to sleep, but at the first departure he would meet a cloud of hideous rousing dreams. He was abroad early and in the street, a certain reality and grip of things returning with the movement and daylight.