sappointments impartially, always
declaring that nowhere could he work with better success than at
Marden Court. He was five years older than his natural age in
development and resource, and the dogged obstinacy that was so direct
a heritage from his father, stood him in good stead in his stiff fight
with the difficulties that stood between him and his goal. Peter
Masters made no sign and no greater success seemed to crown the other
workers' endeavours, but there was always the secret pressure of
unknown competition at work and it told on Christopher. He became more
silent and so absorbed in his task as to lose touch of outside
matters altogether. It was this absorption in his ambition that made
the daily intercourse with Patricia possible at all. Unsuspected by
her, his love, lying in abeyance, was but awaiting the growth in her
of an answering harmony that must come to completion before he could
make his full demand of it.

One day in March, when the land was swept with cold winds and beaten
with rain, Christopher came out of the little wooden building, where
he worked, and stood bareheaded a moment in the driving rain. First he
looked towards the house and then turning sharply towards the left
made his way once more to the edge of the last of the experimental
tracks that threaded that distant corner of the park like the lines of
a spider's web.

He stood looking down at the firm grey surface from which the pouring
rain ran off to the side channels as cleanly as from polished marble.
He walked a few yards down its elastic, easy-treading surface,
ruminating over the "weight and edge" tests that had been applied, and
on the durability trials from the little machine that had run for so
many long days and nights over a similar surface within the wooden
shanty.

It was morning now. His men, whose numbers had increased each month,
had gone to breakfast, and he was alone with his finished work.

The strain and absorption of the long months was over. He had at last
conquered the material difficulties that had been ranged against him.
The dream of the boy had become a tangible reality, ready by reason of
its material existence to claim its own place in the physical world.
This unnamed substance whose composition had awaited in Nature's
laboratory the intelligent mingling of a master hand, would add to the
store of the world's riches and the world's ease, and was his gift to
his generation.

As he stood looking down at t