Fully prepared to take his medicine, Marvin escaped from the hospital and took account of stock. Somewhere near Mezy his good left hand was depositing its calcium, or was at least on its cheerful deliquescent way to do so. He must get him another, as fine a piece of mechanism as the new alloys of steel could furnish. In fact he must have two, one fit for heavy work. After much investigation he got them made to suit him. One wore a glove, the other was a set of tools. He named the fine gentleman Pat, and the tools Maisie, which was about as near as he could spell Mezy in English.

Long before the armistice he was drilling troops again. And just before it was signed he received a curious note from Gratia. She was glad that the enemy was showing symptoms of collapse, because she hoped that now her friends would treat her better. He did not understand this, and wrote at once to beg for an explanation.

But when, a day or two later, a bundle of papers arrived, it threw light on that sentence of Gratia’s. His father had been criticising Asher Ferry.

Chase had been interviewed in Winnipeg, where Ferry’s name was well known to the farmers, and the reporter had asked if he were personally known to Mr. Mahan. Chase replied that he had once met Mr. Ferry at a club, but that neither of them was much of a clubman. Being asked if he did not belong to several clubs, the famous engineer admitted that he did, and humorously inquired if the reporter always went to church. Being asked if Mr. Ferry was a good American, Mr. Mahan flatly declined to discuss the gentleman further.

When back in Chicago, Chase was immediately confronted by a reporter carrying a copy of the Winnipeg interview. He then loosened up. He said that in March, 1917, Ferry attempted to dissuade one of his employees from enlisting, on the ground that the work he was doing was more important than anything he could do as a soldier. The employee nevertheless presented himself at a recruiting station, and was rejected on account of his eyes. Unwilling to accept this decision, because though rather near-sighted he was performing his usual duties as a designer, he applied in vain at another recruiting station. The designer’s name would be furnished if necessary, but as the disclosure would doubtless cost him his job, the reporter had better inquire round for other proofs of Ferry’s disloyalty.

Marvin laid the paper down. So it was Jimmy who had made all this trouble. Though not much of a letter writer, Jimmy had long since informed his chum of the work he was doing. He was making punch-presses fool-proof. In December, 1916, Mr. Ferry had sent for him and asked him what department appealed to him most, and Jimmy had asked to be allowed to remodel the punch-presses. It would be a slow job to change them all, but it ought to be done, because they crushed a good many hands.

Marvin immediately wrote again to Gratia, saying that he now understood the case and thought her father mistaken but not disloyal. He trusted that by June he would be home, and that then she would give him the right to stand by her always. Evidently this letter did not help matters, for it was never answered.

Her silence tempted him. If she would only refuse him, he would feel free to turn again to his first love. And when presently relieved from drilling troops and set to organizing a corps of instructors in mathematics, he was tempted and fell. That is to say, he fell to doing sums.

They led him far, and he found himself grappling with contradictions. The first was the fact that light seems to be an ethereal wave, and yet a bundle of etherless energy. The second was that an atom seems to be a whirling system and yet to vibrate rather than whirl. With these two paradoxes he wrestled mathematically until he felt convinced that the whirling was a reality. As a chemist he would rather see an atom stand still, but as a physicist he was compelled to see it whirl.

He so enjoyed this fall from grace and Gratia that on he went, calculating the mutual electromagnetic mass of a simple system, to find out why hydrogen loses weight when it enters a heavier atom. This was by far the hardest job he had ever undertaken, but it gave him an equation that would always express the total mass of a positive and a negative.

After that he went ahead with two lines of theory, one concerning the interpenetration of elliptical orbits, one predicting the probable varieties of each atomic species. Of course it was all in the dark, but it was the best sort of discipline.

To take an example of his simplest results, he calculated that calcium was forty positives and forty negatives, half of the latter in the sky and half cementing the diminutive sun. Diminutive would seem to be the right word, since it takes six billion billion positives or negatives to make one ampere. Argon, he reckoned, was also forty forty, but its nucleus was more firmly bound, leaving only eighteen planets. Argon was so compact in the middle that nothing could brush an electron off. Calcium, less firmly cemented, would burn in air or join with phosphorus to make bones—like his up at Mezy.

He could see in his mind’s eye a laboratory devoted to nothing but these matters—just the testing of these theories by six or eight methods and many new pieces of apparatus. He could see a group of friends keeping at it for years. And other things he fancied. If some lad in his imaginary group chafed under the routine, he might be allowed to explode heavy metals in the hope of securing helium, or coat those metals with radium emanation and then explode them—any device by which the hand of man might chance to deflect the course of nature within the atom. Suppose that the result reduced the estimate of controllable power by one-half, it would nevertheless make America the master of the world, and he believed that she would use such might humanely.

In March he wrote it all out, in a paper of great length, not for publication but to free his mind, and sent it on to Grein.

April came, and earth was called upon to part with Sir William Crookes, who was perhaps the first to suggest that the atoms of earth are of electric origin. Hardly had he read of Sir William’s death when Marvin was invaded by the influenza germ. It laid him low, kept him in bed six weeks, and left him with a weakened heart. The man who sailed for home was thin enough to serve for his own radiograph. If Gratia suggested pearl, he suggested a structure of calcium less beautiful.