and considered that he had acquitted himself.

His wife interrupted at that point. "I think this nonsense has gone far enough. It is wicked to tamper with God's creatures. It is wicked to discuss such matters—especially on the Sabbath. Abednego, I wish you would give up your work in the laboratory."

Danner's cranium was overlarge and his neck small; but he stiffened it to hold himself in a posture of dignity. "Never."

His wife gazed from the defiant pose to the locked door visible through the parlour. She stirred angrily in her clothes and speared a morsel of food. "You'll be punished for it."

Later in the day Mudge and Gropper laughed heartily at the expense of the former's erstwhile host. Danner read restively. He was forbidden to work on the Sabbath. It was his only compromise. Matilda Danner turned the leaves of the Bible and meditated in a partial vacuum of day-dreams.

On Monday Danner hastened home from his classes. During the night he had had a new idea. And a new idea was a rare thing after fourteen years of groping investigation. "Alkaline radicals," he murmured as he crossed his lawn. He considered a group of ultra-microscopic bodies. He had no name for them. They were the "determinants" of which he had talked. He locked the laboratory door behind himself and bent over the microscope he had designed. "Huh!" he said. An hour later, while he stirred a solution in a beaker, he said: "Huh!" again. He repeated it when his wife called him to dinner. The room was a maze of test tubes, bottles, burners, retorts, instruments. During the meal he did not speak. Afterwards he resumed work. At twelve he prepared six tadpole eggs and put them to hatch. It would be his three hundred and sixty-first separate tadpole hatching.

Then, one day in June, Danner crossed the campus with unusual haste. Birds were singing, a gentle wind eddied over the town from the slopes of the Rocky Mountains, flowers bloomed. The professor did not heed the reburgeoning of nature. A strange thing had happened to him that morning. He had peeped into his workroom before leaving for the college and had come suddenly upon a phenomenon.

One of the tadpoles had hatched in its aquarium. He observed it eagerly, first because it embodied his new idea, and second because it swam with a rare activity. As he looked, the tadpole rushed at the side of its domicile. There was a tinkle and a splash. It had swum through the plate glass! For an instant it lay 

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