Kennedy laughed.

“No,” he said with a twinkle of scientific mischief, “no, I’m going to sleep it off.”

“Thank heaven!” I muttered.

“Because,” he went on seriously, “that case interrupted a long series of tests I am making on the sensitiveness of selenium to light, and I want to finish them up soon.  There’s no telling when I shall be called on to use the information.”

I swallowed hard.  He really meant it.  He was laying out more work for himself.

Next morning I fully expected to find that he had gone.  Instead he was preparing for what he called a quiet day in the laboratory.

“Now for some real work,” he smiled.  “Sometimes, Walter, I feel that I ought to give up this outside activity and devote myself entirely to research.  It is so much more important.”

I could only stare at him and reflect on how often men wanted to do something other than the very thing that nature had evidently intended them to do, and on how fortunate it was that we were not always free agents.

He set out for the laboratory and I determined that as long as he would not stop working, neither would I. I tried to write.  Somehow I was not in the mood.  I wrote at my story, but succeeded only in making it more unintelligible.  I was in no fit condition for it.

It was late in the afternoon.  I had made up my mind to use force, if necessary, to separate Kennedy from his study of selenium.  My idea was that anything from the Metropolitan to the “movies” would do him good, and I had almost carried my point when a big, severely plain black foreign limousine pulled up with a rush at the laboratory door.  A large man in a huge fur coat jumped out and the next moment strode into the room.  He needed no introduction, for we recognised at once J. Perry Spencer, one of the foremost of American financiers and a trustee of the university.

With that characteristic directness which I have always thought accounted in large measure for his success, he wasted scarcely a word in coming straight to the object of his visit.  “Professor Kennedy,” he began, chewing his cigar and gazing about with evident interest at the apparatus Craig had collected in his warfare of science with crime, “I have dropped in here as a matter of patriotism.  I want you to preserve to America those masterpieces of art and literature which I have collected all over the world during many years.  They are the objects of one of the most curious pieces of vandalism of which I have ever heard.  Professor Kennedy,” he concluded earnestly, “could I ask you to call on Dr. Hugo Lith, the curator of my private museum, as soon as you can possibly find it convenient?”

“Most assuredly, Mr. Spencer,” replied Craig, with a whimsical side glance at me that told without words that this was better relaxation to him than either the Metropolitan or the “movies.”  “I shall be glad to see Dr. Lith at any time—­right now, if it is convenient to him.”