His mother was silent, and he, as though weary of the conversation, presently rose and left the room. Stepping out on the lawn in the full blaze of noonday, he looked towards the dome of the laboratory, but could scarcely fix his eyes upon its extreme brilliancy, which was blinding at every point. He felt very keenly that it was indeed the longest day of the year; never had hours moved so slowly,--and despite the summer glory of the day,--so drearily. His thoughts dwelt persistently on the bound and imprisoned form swung in solitude under the great Wheel, which he knew must now be revolving at almost lightning speed, churning the water beneath it into prismatic spray,--and every now and then a strong temptation beset him to go and unlock the door of the prison house, and see whether his victim had wakened to the consciousness of her condition. But he restrained this impulse. With evening the slender curve of the new moon glided into the sky, looking like the pale vision of a silver sickle, and a delicious calm pervaded the air. His thoughts gradually took on a more human tendency,--he allowed himself to pity his “subject.” After all, what an arid sort of fate had been hers! The only child of one of those painfully respectable British couples who never move out of the conventional rut, and for whom the smallest expression or honest opinion is “bad form,”--and herself endowed (by some freak of Nature) with exceptional qualities of brain, what a neutral and sad-coloured existence hers had been when love and the hope of marriage had deserted her! No wonder she had resolved to break away and seek some outlet for her cramped and imprisoned mentality. “Though marriage is drab-coloured enough!” he mused--“Unless husband and wife are prudent, and agree to live apart from each other for so many months in the year. And now--if my experiment succeeds she will make a fool or a lunatic of every man her eyes rest upon--except myself!”