She dropped the two animals back into the water and began to row homeward through the hush of the Sunday afternoon, her bashfulness returning. She could not understand why, having admitted so much, she still hung back.

But Marvin might well be patient, for it had taken thousands of millions of years to coax the bashful atoms into her young body. Once her carbon had burned in the white incandescent smoke around the sun, and later fled embraces through the storms of earth and countless creatures that never would be man. She was at least as old as thorium, which lay radioactive for twenty billion years before any lover seduced it into a gas-mantle, and which even then refused to glow till a trifle of cerium set it off.

She rowed her lilies home, and trimmed their porous stems, and floated them in a wide bowl of glass, where they presently closed their eyes for the night. And her father, coming to supper and seeing them on the table, beamed with delight. “I’m sorry, daddy, that they are all closed up.”

“What, apologizing for lilies? Horace would say that even this gold is better hid. But there’s a heart of gold that has been hid from her old father almost too many nights.”

“Why,” said Jean, “I’ve told you a lot of intimate things—for instance that I happened along in the greatest year that ever was, when Madame Curie found radium.”

“Yes, child, but you have been almost as unknown to me as radium is. I might count your life by seconds, and plead that every second brought a new Jean. I have loved them all, and fancied all the millions mine, but I catch but glimpses of you as you grow.”

“Daddy, you talk as if I were a movie. But some day, when our ship comes in, we’ll go and see a better show than that. I’m dying to see radium in a spinthariscope. It has simply changed the world.”

“Wasn’t the world wonderful enough without it?”

“Yes, but you can’t prevent such things from being discovered.”

The old man meditatively buttered his toast, and nodded.

“I couldn’t, for instance, prevent a certain young man from discovering my daughter.”

Silence.

“Jean, darling, once you asked me why I was so late in discovering your mother. I am willing to tell you now. I was blinded by the fear of Nemesis for what I had done in the war.”

Jean quietly set down her teacup.

“Father, have you never felt that Nemesis overtook you?”

“No, I killed men for an abstraction, but an abstraction is the only thing a man can be sure of. In a world so dream-like that even one’s daughter eludes one, there is nothing to tie to except ideas. Horatio died for an idea. I will not blame myself that my boy acted in good faith.”

Again silence. At last she said,

“Will there be more wars?”

“Yes. All this incredible wealth that the scientific men have showered on earth will be fought for again and again.”

“But the men who produce it never fight for it.”

“No, because they live in a world of their own, the only world where communism works. They tell all they know, they share every thought, they give away their secrets, because they dare not do otherwise. They love their mother earth, and so they are bound to be martyred.”

Still more silence, while Jean’s teacup remained untouched, and her sweet eyes were full of pain.

“Daughter, we have long lived on very little, thanks to your creative economy, and I can’t see that you are less fair for all your suffering. Should you grieve if now I gave away a part of my land to needy ones?”

“No, father.”

“Then I am minded to do it—in fact to deed them all my holding, retaining only what the foolish Lear retained.”

“Can you trust them?”

“Yes, because they wish to make use of your brother’s name.”

“Are they crippled soldiers?”

“Yes, in a sense, but their enterprise is scientific. Over where your laboratory stands they wish to build the Horatio Rich Laboratory of Physical Research.”

The forgetmenot eyes filled with tears.

“How very, very beautiful! But how came they—why, this is Mr. Chase Mahan’s doing!”

“Even so, my darling. It seems that Mr. Mahan is much interested in the very thing you wish to see, namely radium. I shall not attempt to explain matters that are beyond me, but I dare say that crippled soldiers sometimes receive benefit from radium treatment.”