“Perhaps you have not thrown the proper switch,” Garven suggested, but the boy shook his head miserably. “I have started it a hundred times,” he answered; “there was never anything simpler. No, the machine is not as it used to be. There must be some parts missing.” They went over it minutely, inch by inch, all four of them, while Betsey and Miss Miranda still waited by the door. “Certain parts have been taken out,” David declared at last, “the jets are missing and these valves have been unscrewed. The machine can never go without them.” There followed a search in every drawer, on every shelf, in each nook and cranny of the whole room. “He seems to have put them away in some very safe place,” an assistant said. “It is unfortunate that he did not think that some one else might wish to use them without him. Very unfortunate and very strange.” David was standing in the middle of the room, his eye on the table, once such a litter of papers but now quite bare. “He has burned all his drawings and plans,” he observed, “and he must have destroyed those missing parts. Do you remember, Betsey, he said the machine should never run again!” “But why, why?” demanded Garven. “This is a thing I do not understand at all.” They told him the whole story, there seemed no reason for concealment. The older man heard it through in silence. “We worked together years ago, Reynolds and I,” he said at the conclusion, “and he was the same as now, very ambitious, very tenacious of his purpose, but sometimes overwhelmed with such tempests of discouragement that he would wish to destroy all that he had done. He was worn out, I knew, his letter to me showed that, and he had a hard and a cruel blow. He has brought us to the edge of a very great discovery—and has left us there?” “Is he so ill, Miss Reynolds, that he cannot be asked where the missing parts are?” questioned one of the other men. “Surely if he knew that his friend was here, he would want to have them produced. Could you not ask him?” “He is half-conscious at times,” Miss Miranda answered doubtfully; “I might try.” “I urge you to do so,” Garven said gravely. “What he has here, if it can be proved a success should mean a fortune to him, it should mean fame and, most of all, it should mean a great step forward in men’s knowledge. I think nothing should be left untried.”