She handed them to him at once, and he sat down to read. While he was thus occupied, her gaze constantly wandered to the small, scythe-like instrument mowing off the seconds in dots of flame as a mower sweeps off the heads of daisies in the grass. A curious crimson colour seemed to be diffused round the whole piece of mechanism,--an effect she had never noticed before, and then she remembered it was late in the afternoon and that the sun had set. The rosy light emanating from the instrument and deeply reflected in the crystal pedestal on which it was balanced, seemed like an after-glow from the sky,--but the actual grey twilight outside was too pronounced and cold to admit of such an explanation. Suddenly Dimitrius looked up. “You are right!” he said. “This ancient problem demands my closest study. And yet it is no problem at all, but only an exposition of my inmost thought!” He paused,--then: “Come here, Diana May!” he continued--“I may as well begin with you. Come and sit close beside me.” She obeyed. With his eyes fixed upon her face, he went on: “You, as a woman of superior intelligence, have never supposed, I am sure, that I have secured your services merely to decipher and copy out old Latin script? No!--I see by your look that you have fully realised that such is not all the actual need I have of you. I have waited to find out, by a study of your character and temperament, when and how I could state plainly my demands. I think I need not wait much longer. Now this ancient treatise on ‘Problems,’ obscure and involved in wording as it is, helps me to the conviction that I am on the right track of discovery. It treats of Light. ‘The problem of the Fourth, Sixth and Seventh,’ with its ‘ultimate culmination of the Eighth’ is the clue. In that ‘ultimate culmination’ is the Great Secret!” His eyes flashed,--his features were transfigured by an inward fervour.