NOT long after, at breakfast, the young and disdainful maid conveyed to Anthony a request to proceed, when he had finished, to the conservatory. There he discovered Annot Har-dinge, with her sleeves rolled up above her vigorous elbows, dusting with a fine, brown powder the rows of monotonous, potted plants. She directed him to follow her with a slender-nosed watering pot. He wondered silently at the featureless display of what he found to be ordinary bean plants, some of the dwarf variety, others drawn up against the wall. They bore in exact, minute inscriptions, strange names and titles, cryptic numbers; some, he saw, were labelled “Dominants,” others, “Recessives.” “The 'cupids' are doing wretchedly, poor dears!” she exclaimed before a row of dwarf sweet peas. “This is my father's laboratory,” she told him briefly. “I thought he had something to do with Darwin and the missing link.” She gazed at him pityingly from the heights of a vast superiority. “Darwin did some valuable preliminary work,” she instructed him; “although Wallace really guessed it all first. Now Mendel, Bateson, are the important names. They were busy with the beginnings; and, among the beginnings, plants are the most suggestive.” She indicated a small row of budding sweet peas. “Perhaps, in those flowers, the whole secret of the universe will be found; perhaps the mystery of our souls will be explained; isn't it thrilling! The secret of inheritance may sleep in those buds--if they are white it will prove... oh, a thousand things, and among them that father is the most wonderful scientist alive; it will explain heredity and control it, make a new kind of world possible, a world without the most terrible diseases. What church, what saint, what god, has really done that?” she demanded. “Stupid priggish figures bending out of their gold-plated heavens!”