his patent receiver, and grew angry.

"Oh, it isn't the receiver," she said, smoothing her curling hair; "it's
us. You don't understand me a bit--not now--and that's why you can't
hear me. Take my advice, Morris"--and she looked at him sharply--"when
you find a woman whom you can hear on your patent receiver, you had
better marry her. It will be a good excuse for keeping her at a distance
afterwards."

Then he lost his temper; indeed, he raved, and stormed, and nearly
smashed the patent receiver in his fury. To a scientific man, let it
be admitted, it was nothing short of maddening to be told that the
successful working of his instrument, to the manufacture of which he
had given eight years of toil and study, depended upon some pre-existent
sympathy between the operators of its divided halves. If that were so,
what was the use of his wonderful discovery, for who could ensure a
sympathetic correspondent? And yet the fact remained that when, in
their playmate days, he understood his cousin Mary, and when her quiet,
indolent nature had been deeply moved by the shock of the news of her
mother's peril, the aerophone had worked. Whereas now, when she had
become a grown-up young lady, he did not understand her any longer--he,
whose heart was wrapped up in his experiments, and who by nature feared
the adult members of her sex, and shrank from them; when, too, her
placid calm was no longer stirred, work it would not.

She laughed at his temper; then grew serious, and said:

"Don't get angry, Morris. After all, there are lots of things that you
and I can't understand, and it isn't odd that you should have tumbled
across one of them. If you think of it, nobody understands anything.
They know that certain things happen, and how to make them happen; but
they don't know why they happen, or why, as in your case, when they
ought to happen, they won't."

"It is all very well for you to be philosophical," he answered, turning
upon her; "but can't you see, Mary, that the thing there is my life's
work? It is what I have given all my strength and all my brain to make,
and if it fails in the end--why, then I fail too, once and forever. And
I have made it talk. It talked perfectly between this place and Seaview,
and now you stand there and tell me that it won't work any more because
I don't understand you. Then what am I to do?"

"Try to understand me, if you think it worth while, which I don't; or
go on experimenting," she answered. "T