The clock had ticked and jerked its way through the better part of the hour when the weird muttering became once more audible: “Curious, curious! Yet it works to my theory. Now if these last figures agree it will be proof. Pshaw, the scales are tired. How they fidget! Belphegor, my friend, down with you, the smallest vibration would ruin my week’s work. Down! Now let us see. As seventy-three is to a hundred and twenty-five ... as seventy-three is to a hundred and twenty-five.... A plague on it!” exclaimed Master Simon pettishly, without looking up. “There’s that Barnaby, of course in the nick of wrong time!” The door at the dim end of the room had been opened softly. A puff of wood smoke had been blown down the chimney. A tiny draught skimmed across the table; the steady lamplight flickered and cast dancing shadows; and Master Simon’s tense fingers trembled with irritation. “All to begin again. Curse you, Barnaby! You’re deaf, I can curse you, thank Providence!” Without turning round he made a hasty, forbidding gesture of one hand. The door was shut as gently as it had been opened. Master Simon gave a deep sigh, and still fixedly eyeing the scales, stretched his cramped hands along the table for a moment’s rest. “Now, now? Ha—Ho—What? Sixty-nine to eighty-two? Impossible! Tchah! Those scales have the palsy—nay, Simon Rickart, it is your impotent hand. Old age, old age, my friend ... or stormy youth, alas!” His muttering whisper rose to louder cadence. “Had you but known then, in your young folly, the chains you were forging, for your aged wisdom! But sixty to-day, and this senile trembling! Not a shake of that hand, Simon, but is paying for the toss of the cup; not a mist in that brain but is the smoke of wanton, bygone fires. Well vast is the pity of it! Had you but the hand now of that dreamer up above! Had you but the virtue of his temperate life! And the fool is staring at his feeble twinklers ... worshipping the unattainable, while all rich Nature, here at hand, awaits the explorer. Oh, to feel able to trace Earth mysteries to the marrow of Man; to hold the six days’ wonder in one single action of the mind ... and to be foiled at every turn by the trembling of a finger!” He leaned back in his chair, long lines of discouragement furrowing his face. Behind him, in the silence, barely more audible than the simmering sounds of the fires and the lembics, there was a stir of another presence, quiet, but living. But Master Simon, absorbed in his own world of thought, perceived nothing. With closed eyes, he made another effort to conquer the rebellious weakness of the flesh and bring it into proper subjection to the merciless vigour of the mind. At that moment the one important thing on earth to the old student was the success of his analysis. And had the Trump of Doom begun to sound in his ears, his single desire would still have been to endeavour to conclude it before the final crash.