Still a lucky dog proud of you glad to pay for laboratory assistant dearest love from all. The message gave him back his courage. He would not accept a cent. He would teach his right hand to do the work of two, and then apply to Grein for a job. He would do nothing for the rest of his life but study how to blow Berlin off the face of the earth. Nothing but subatomic lightning would teach the Germans anything. They had a natural monopoly of potash, they had mastered nitrogen, they had phosphates the secret of which they owed to a British chemist. Their next war with America would be over dye-stuffs. But wait—he was forgetting Gratia. He was probably going to marry Gratia. He was not exactly in the mood to do so, but he must remember that she could hardly live on the salary of a laboratory assistant. Who was this lovely creature, anyhow? He asked the nurse to bring him the letters from his trunk. There were twenty-four from Gratia, and he read them all. They were written in a neat round hand, every _i_ dotted. They were most friendly. They kept track of him. In the earlier ones there was much about the life at Eglantine. Several concerned boxes that she was sending for his men. She described in pretty detail the commencement of 1917, when she was class president. She described her return to Chicago, her bandage-making, the club for soldiers and sailors, the Waukegan club for the blue-jackets, and so forth and so on. But the letters of the current year were less interesting. She seemed to be running out of subjects. When he had been watching the enemy, she had been watching the sunsets from her father’s yacht. Up in the straits of St. Mary a very quiet farm-girl had given her some flowers. She did not seem to realize that he was not concerned with farm-girls. He spent half an hour in tying those twenty-four letters up again. They were not so fascinating as the job of learning to use his teeth and hand. He let the nurse return the mass of expensive note-paper to his trunk, but would not let her take his mother’s letters. Over these he laid a protecting arm, and went to sleep holding them close to his side.