“I shall answer them all,” said Sanson. “I may tell you that it was never my plan to send our monkeys ahead of us into this world. I meant to go, Arnold. But unexpectedly there came into my life something against which I had made no provision. In other words, absurd as it sounds, I fell in love. Then I planned to take Esther with me. But this plan, too, was changed, for, to be quite frank, I gathered that she preferred you to me. I then conceived the entertaining idea of taking you both with me, so that our rivalry might be renewed in a world where your advantages of personality would be counterbalanced by my power. Arnold, I never for an instant doubted that I should stand where I stand today. So, having persuaded you to enter the cylinder—and how I laughed at your imbecile complaisance—I invited Esther to follow you. There was no difficulty. On the contrary, she could hardly be convinced that I was in earnest. However, I speedily convinced her by the simple process of putting on the cap. Then, since the cylinders can be manipulated from within, I myself entered the third.” “You, Sanson!” I gasped. “You, too, have slept a hundred years?” His look became envenomed, and the quick gust of passion that came upon him was, to my mind, evidence of a mentality unbalanced by unrestrained authority. “Arnold,” he cried, “would you believe that an end so carefully planned, so mastered in each detail, could be thwarted by an instant’s lack of balance? You remember that, of the three cylinders, one was already set a century ahead? That, save for the six months’ leeway that existed on all the dials, and was, therefore, immaterial—that one, calculated to the utmost nicety, leap-years and all, was the one I had selected for myself already. That was the one Esther entered. The dial upon the second cylinder I set in your presence, but omitted the four and twenty days. That was your cylinder. And the third—mine—do you remember?—was set to sixty-five. “I removed this cylinder to a second vault of which you do not know. I awoke in 1980. Arnold, I entered it and forgot the dial! When I recovered strength—and I had supplied some food products to last me during that brief period of recovery—I hurried to this vault. I found only your cylinder, behind the fallen bricks. When I saw that you still slept I thought your mechanism had gone wrong. Then, going back to examine my cylinder, I realized the truth. I, who had loved Esther with all my power, and vowed with all my will to win her, I, a young man of twenty-five, must wait for five and thirty years before she awakened. When my time came to claim her I would be old. O, Esther, what I have endured during these years!”