Manella gazed about her in the darkness, bewildered. A glittering little mob of fire-flies danced above her head like a net of jewels.
"Oh, you talk so strangely!" she said--"You forget!--I am a poor girl--I have no money--"
"Neither has he,"--and Gwent gave a short laugh. "But he could make a million dollars to-morrow--if he chose. Having only himself to consider, he DOESN'T choose! If he had YOU, he'd change his opinion. Seaton's not the man to have a wife without keeping her in comfort. I tell you again, you can be the making of him. You can save his life!"
She clasped her hands nervously. A little gasping sigh came from her lips.
"Oh!--Santa Madonna!--to save his life!"
"Ah, just that!" said Gwent impressively--"Think of it! I'm not speaking lies--that's not my way. The man is making for himself what we in the European war called a 'danger zone,' where everybody not 'in the know' was warned off hidden mines. Hidden mines! He's got them! That's so! You can take my word! It's no good looking for them, no one will ever find them but himself, and he thinks of nothing else. But if he fell in love with YOU---"
She gave a hopeless gesture.
"He will not--he thinks nothing of me--nothing!--no!--though he says I am beautiful!"
"Oh, he says that, does he?" and Gwent smiled--"Well, he'd be a fool if he didn't!"
"Ah, but he does not care for beauty!" Manella went on. "He sees it and he smiles at it, but it does not move him!"
Gwent looked at her in perplexity, not knowing quite how to deal with the subject he himself had started. Truth to tell his nerves had been put distinctly "on edge" by Seaton's cool, calculating and seemingly callous assertion as to the powers he possessed to destroy, if he chose, a nation,--and all sorts of uncomfortable scraps of scientific information gleaned from books and treatises suggested themselves vividly to his mind at this particular moment when he would rather have forgotten them. As, for example--"A pound weight of radio-active energy, if it could be extracted in as short a time as we pleased, instead of in so many million years, could do the work of a hundred and fifty tons of dynamite." This agreeable fact stuck in his brain as a bone may stick in a throat, causing a sense of congestion. Then the words of one of the "pulpit thunderers" of New York rolled back on his ears--"This world will be destroyed, not by the hand of God, but by the wilful and devilish malingering of Man!" Another pleasant thought! And he felt himself to be a poor weak fool to even try to put up a girl's beauty, a girl's love as a barrier to the output of a destroying force engineered by a terrific human intention,--it was like the old story of the Scottish heroine who thrust a slender arm through the great staple of a door to hold back the would-be murderers of a King.