outrageously and were never once summoned to the old gunroom to be lectured. Kate Coggeshall had made the dramatic Cynthia out of nothing—had even taught her the multiplication table before allowing her to plunge into music—and was convinced that these two young folks were but playing parts in an opera.

The judgment was approximately correct, at least for the time being. To Cynthia he was still a sort of Escamillo who had dropped down out of the sky. As for Marvin, he knew that he was playing with fire, but thought himself safe. Cynthia was like the high-frequency electrons which he had learned to handle in the laboratory—the sort which at a pressure of half a million volts will kiss the experimenter’s lips without burning them.

There was certainly nothing designing in Cynthia. She might perhaps have thrown her toils about Jimmy, but she was content to call him a stick. She might have gone further and called him stingy, for he was never known to send sweets or flowers to anybody at Eglantine.

In matters touching family pride, however, Jimmy was more liberal. For instance, he subscribed to the expensive Philosophical Magazine because his father and his grandfather had done so before him, back to the time when in England philosophy meant physics.

And it was in Jimmy’s house in June of 1914 that Marvin picked up the “Phil. Mag.” and read the most important article he had ever read in his life. The author was quite unknown to him—one of Rutherford’s men who signed himself H. G. J. Moseley. This man was reporting some measurements that he had made by the use of crystal gratings and short rays. He asserted that the method gave a spectrum of two dark lines for each element, and that the frequency of vibration increased definitely, step by step.

Marvin laid down the magazine and reflected. This unknown Moseley had found it—a sure way to determine the amount of electricity concealed in the heart of any atom. In ten years chemistry would be a new science. In much less than that time every chemical element would receive a number indicating the charge on the nucleus.

Moseley had already numbered some thirty elements, beginning with aluminum as 13, and calculating gold at 79.

Marvin ran over a few of the other elements in his mind and guessed the numbers they would bear. Hydrogen would be 1, helium 2, lithium 3, beryllium 4, boron 5, carbon 6, nitrogen 7, oxygen 8. If gold was 79, lead would probably be 82. Think of it—an atom of lead 

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