Notwithstanding their daily contact with the most appalling cases of disease and death, they come and go briskly with jocular greetings on the stair-ways. They return to their homes each night to read, to smoke their pipes, deporting themselves like commonplace fathers and brothers and husbands. They even make love like other men; but, nevertheless, they may be overtaken in muse like alchemists, subject to fear and hope like children. To the business-man their ways are ways of silence and sorcery. Their deep-hid convictions are at variance with all theories of Christian redemption, and the realities of their realm more startling than any romance of war or peace. To them matter is as insoluble as the transforming forces which emanate from it. They play with nerves, laying bare the beating heart of life, forever finding, yet forever failing. To this big, bare building, to one of these barren rooms, Morton Serviss returned after eight weeks study of the sands and the stars and the cave-dwellings of vanished men. From the infinitely lonely and huge and beautiful he cloistered himself to pore upon the habits of the infinitely small, to listen to the swarming, diminished tumult of the protozoa. He came back, as usual, brown, alert, and keen-eyed--eager for work, confident of some new victory, for he was an investigator of weight and standing among the younger men of science. On the street he was indistinguishable from other debonair young men of good social position; in his laboratory he was a master, absorbed, reticent, and precise of plan. His chief, a little, gray, bent, brusque German, greeted him with absent-minded smile, remarked briefly upon his good health, and then they set to work. In thirty seconds he had forgotten the desert, the face of Viola, all his energies concentrated on the segment of cancer beneath his eye. A newly developed germ, a thousandth part the stature of a gnat's toe, shut out the valley of the Colorow. All day he moved among a wilderness of tubes, jars, and copper ovens, peering, observing--and in a sense happy. But at night, when alone with his pipe in his study, the lavender sands, the violet peaks, the vivid saffron skies returned with power. Viola, too, came back to bewitch him from his reading, to make his microscopic world of shadowy substance and the smell of his laboratory a hateful thing. He heard nothing further of her. Britt wrote once or twice, but did not allude to either Clarke or the Lamberts, and Serviss did not care to ask particularly about them. It was better for him not to be concerned further with the girl's singular history. He hated the irregular, the pretentious. His own life, so clear, so well regulated, made her daily performances the more monstrous. The whole had become so foolish in retrospect that he refrained from speaking of it, even to his sister.