een-eyed--eager for work, confident of some new victory, for he was
an investigator of weight and standing among the younger men of
science. On the street he was indistinguishable from other debonair
young men of good social position; in his laboratory he was a master,
absorbed, reticent, and precise of plan.

His chief, a little, gray, bent, brusque German, greeted him with
absent-minded smile, remarked briefly upon his good health, and then
they set to work. In thirty seconds he had forgotten the desert, the
face of Viola, all his energies concentrated on the segment of cancer
beneath his eye. A newly developed germ, a thousandth part the stature
of a gnat's toe, shut out the valley of the Colorow. All day he moved
among a wilderness of tubes, jars, and copper ovens, peering,
observing--and in a sense happy.

But at night, when alone with his pipe in his study, the lavender
sands, the violet peaks, the vivid saffron skies returned with power.
Viola, too, came back to bewitch him from his reading, to make his
microscopic world of shadowy substance and the smell of his laboratory
a hateful thing.

He heard nothing further of her. Britt wrote once or twice, but did
not allude to either Clarke or the Lamberts, and Serviss did not care
to ask particularly about them. It was better for him not to be
concerned further with the girl's singular history. He hated the
irregular, the pretentious. His own life, so clear, so well regulated,
made her daily performances the more monstrous. The whole had become
so foolish in retrospect that he refrained from speaking of it, even
to his sister.

It was not quite true that he saw little of New York, for his sister,
Mrs. Rice--a widow with two children--who kept his house, or, rather,
his double flat, was a social soul, and not merely went about freely,
but entertained regularly. They lived handsomely, and the world in
which they moved was crowded with duties as well as with sane
pleasures. They entertained at their table artists from Paris, savans
from Berlin, and literary lesser lights from London, and they enjoyed
all this, envying the richer and more ostentatious families of the
city as little as they despised the poor of Hester Street. The one
quality which they insisted upon in their guests was intellectual
cleverness. Perhaps they were a little severe on bores.

Their ways were quite as remote from the so-called captains of
industry as from the farmers of Jersey, and the roa