Burton leaned a little forward in his place.

“Professor,” he said, “remember that there are only two small beans, each less than the size of a sixpence, which I have handed over to you.  As to the qualities which they possess, there is no shadow of doubt about them for I myself am a proof.  Yet you take one’s breath away with your schemes.  How could you, out of two beans, provide a food for millions?”

The professor smiled.

“Science will do it, my dear Mr. Burton,” he replied, with some note of patronage in his tone, “science, the highways of which to you are an untrodden road.  I myself am a chemist.  I myself, before I felt the call of Assyria, have made discoveries not wholly unimportant.  This afternoon I spent four hours in my laboratory with one of your beans.  I tell you frankly that I have discovered constituents in that small article which absolutely stupefy me, qualities which no substance on earth that I know of, in the vegetable or mineral world, possesses.  Yet within a week, the chemist whom I have engaged to come to my assistance and I will assuredly have resolved that little bean into a definite formula.  When we have done that, the rest is easy.  Its primary constituents will form the backbone of our new food.  If we are only able to reproduce them in trifling quantities, then we must add a larger proportion of some harmless and negative substance.  The matter is simple.”

“No worry about that, that I can see,” Mr. Bunsome remarked.  “So long as we have this testimony of Mr. Burton’s, and the professor’s introduction and explanation, we don’t really need the bean at all.  We’ve only got to print his story, get hold of some tasteless sort of stuff that no one can exactly analyze, and the whole thing’s done so far as we are concerned.  Of course, whether it takes on or not with the public is always a bit of a risk, but the risk doesn’t lie with us to control.  It depends entirely upon the advertisements.  If we are able to engage Rentoul, and raise enough money to give him a free hand for the posters as well as the literary matter, why then, I tell you, this moral food will turn out to be the greatest boom of the generation.”

Mr. Cowper moved a little uneasily in his chair.

“Yours, Mr. Bunsome,” he said, “is purely the commercial point of view.  So far as Mr. Burton and I are concerned, and Mr. Bomford, too, you must please remember that we are profoundly and absolutely convinced of the almost miraculous properties of this preparation.  Its romantic history is a thing we have thoroughly attested.  Our only fear at the present moment is that too large a quantity of the constituents of the beans which Mr. Burton has handed over to me, may be found to be distilled from Oriental herbs brought by that old student from the East.  However, of that in a few days’ time we shall of course be able to speak more definitely.”

Mr. Bunsome coughed.

“Anyway,” he declared, “that isn’t my show.  My part is to get the particulars of this thing into shape, draft a prospectus, and engage Rentoul if we can raise the money.  I presume Mr. Burton will have no objection to our using his photograph on the posters?”