“You don’t realise it, Jack; but it’s just on the cards that our whole future turns on Henley-Davenport. I see things coming. They’re banking up on the horizon already; and if the storm bursts, nothing but Henley-Davenport can save us. And the worst of it is that he doesn’t seem to be getting ahead much at present. It’s no fault of his. No one could work harder; and the other two--Struthers and Anderson--are just as keen. But it doesn’t come out, somehow. And the tantalising thing is that he has proved it _can_ be done; only at present it isn’t economical. He gets energy liberated, all right; but where we need a ton of gunpowder, he can only give us a percussion cap, so to speak. If only he can hit on it in time....” * * * * * For my own part, that period was depressing. All the joy had gone out of my work. Only after I had lost her did I realise how great a part Elsa had played in my planning of the future. Her disappearance cast a shade over all my schemes; and soon I gave up entirely the side of the reconstruction in which we had collaborated. I could not bear to think over again the lines along which we had worked so intimately in common. I simply put them out of my mind and concentrated my attention exclusively upon the material aspects of the problem. I have said this quite freely; though possibly the reader may look upon me as a weak man for allowing such factors to enter into so vast a matter. Had I been superhuman, no doubt, I could have shut my mind to the past; and gone forward without flinching. But I never imagined that I was a super-man; and at this time especially I felt anything but superhuman. I was wounded to the quick; and all I desired was to avoid the whole subject of Elsa in my thoughts. And when I come to think of it, it seems quite probable that I did my best work in this way. If I had continued to dream of Fata Morgana and all its wonders, I should simply have drugged myself with a mental opiate and my work would have suffered on other sides. Elsa’s whole attitude to Nordenholt and myself had been a puzzle. I could not understand why she should have been so bitter against us; for try as I could, I failed to see anything discreditable in our doings. The logic of events had thrust us into the position we occupied, it seemed to me; and I could not appreciate her view of the situation. Nordenholt kept silence on the subject for some days after our trip up Loch Lomond; but he finally gave me his views in reply to urgent questioning. “I think it’s something like this, Jack: from what I know of Elsa in the past, she’s got a vivid imagination, very vivid; and it happens to be the pictorial imagination. Give her a line of description, and she has the power of calling up the scene in her mind, filling in missing details and producing something which impresses her profoundly.” “Well, I don’t see what that’s got to do with calling me a brute,” I said. “It doesn’t seem to help me much.”