The two columns or more which had been usual in the early days of Rathbone's disappearance, had now dwindled to a single three-quarters of a column. Sir William realized that the public interest was already dying out. For a few minutes, when he had methodically folded the papers in a pile, he allowed his thoughts to dwell upon the recent incidents at Brighton. Charliewood had killed himself. What did that mean? It simply meant that Eustace Charliewood was out of the way. The baronet had not a single regret in his mind. Despite the geniality of his manner to his late henchman, when circumstances had seemed to require that, he had regarded him as simply a servant and a tool, and as of considerably less importance in the scheme of things than, say, a delicate induction coil, or a new drum armature. Then there was Marjorie. In his quick summarizing way, allowing no emotion to enter his brain at the moment, Sir William reviewed that aspect of his Brighton visit too. Well, that also was satisfactory. Things were going indeed far better than he had hoped. He had accomplished exactly what he had meant to do, rather more indeed, and he had done so with singular success. His position with Lady Poole and her daughter was perhaps stronger than it had ever been, even in the days when his position was, so to speak, an official one. Good again! And with that, the cool, hard intellect dismissed personal affairs entirely, and with a sigh of relief the physical body of the man leant back in his chair, while the brain went swiftly and gladly into the high realms of science. At Victoria, Sir William's motor brougham was waiting, and he was driven swiftly through the lighted streets of London towards his own house in Regent's Park. He smoked a cigar and bent forward, looking at the moving panorama of people under the gas-lamps, as a man sits in an arm-chair and lets the world defile before him. And as he watched the countless throngs, streams that moved and pulsed in the arteries of the great city as the blood moves and pulses in the veins and arteries of man, he was filled with a tremendous exultation and pride. Soon, ah, soon! he would be master of every single mind and soul that, housed in its envelope of flesh, flitted so rapidly past the windows of the swift-moving machine in which he sat. No secrets, great or small, noble or petty, worthy or evil, would be hidden from him, and he, alone, by the power of his intellect and the abnormal force of his will, had wrested from nature the most stupendous and mysterious of all her secrets. There was but little more to be done now, before the great invention would be shown to the leading scientists of the world.