It has broken Dr. Kent. A month now has pa.s.sed. He seldom mentions Alan to Babs and me. But when he does, he tries to smile and say that Alan soon will return. He has been very ill this last week, though he is better now. He did not tell us that he was working to compound another supply of the drugs, but we knew it very well.
And his emotion, the strain of it, made him break. He was in bed a week.
We are living in New York, quite near the Museum of the American Society for Scientific Research. In a room of the biological department there, the precious fragment of golden quartz lies guarded. A microscope is over it, and there is never a moment of the day or night without an alert, keen-eyed watcher peering down.
But nothing has appeared. Neither friend or foe--nothing. I cannot say so to Babs, but often I fear that Dr. Kent will suddenly die, and the secret of his drugs die with him. I hinted that I would make a trip into the atom if he would let me, but it excited him so greatly I had to laugh it off with the a.s.surance that of course Alan would soon return safely to us. Dr. Kent is an old man now, unnaturally old, with, it seems, the full weight of eighty years pressing upon him. He cannot stand this emotion. I think he is despairingly summoning strength to work upon his drugs, fearful that at any moment, he will not be equal to it. Yet more fearful to disclose the secret and unloose such a diabolic power.
There are nights when with Dr. Kent asleep, Babs and I slip away and go to the Museum. We dismiss the guard for a time, and in that private room we sit by the microscope to watch. The fragment of golden quartz lies on its clean white slab with a brilliant light upon it.
Mysterious little golden rock! What secrets are there, down beyond the vanishing point in the realm of the infinitely small? Our human longings go to Alan and Glora.
But sometimes we are swept by the greater viewpoint. Awed by the mysteries of nature, we realize how very small and unimportant we are in the vast scheme of things. We envisage the infinite reaches of astronomical s.p.a.ce overhead. Realms of largeness unfathomable. And at our feet, everywhere, a myriad entrances into the infinitely small. With ourselves in between--with our fatuous human consciousness that we are of some importance to it all!
Truly there are more things in Heaven and Earth than are dreamed of in our philosophy!