"Bravo, Smith!" cried George Dillon, coming round, when the cheering and general congratulations were over, to slap his colleague on the back, metaphorically and actually. "We've done that; and now perhaps, old man, you'll have time for other things."
"Yes," assented the tall, gaunt man, dreamily; "now I shall have time to settle that point about the searchlight."
"The what?"
"Search-light. There's been a correspondence in the Engineer about it; and as I've all the electric plant here, lying useless, now the show's over,--until it's wanted for something else, of course,--I am going to see if I can't overcome their difficulty in concentrating all the power on a sufficiently narrow area. I believe I know how to do it."
George Dillon looked at him with fierce, humorous exasperation. "Believe!" he echoed. "I know you can! You are the most intolerably circumscribed, self-concentrated, narrow-minded machine of a man I ever came across. Heaven help you!"
As he drove Mrs. Smith home again, it was his turn to sit mumchance until, womanlike, she relented faintly, and, exaggerating her own powers, trusted she had not been, etc., though of course, etc.--
"Not in the least, thank you," he replied. "I was only meditating if I should tell you that I think Eugene has softening of the brain."
"Softening of the brain!" she echoed, horrified. "Oh, doctor, do you think it's that?"
"Well, it isn't softening of the heart, anyhow," he said grimly. "But I'm not joking. If someone doesn't get a hold on some portion of that man--I don't care what it is--heart, brain, stomach, anything--and prevent him from killing himself with work, India will lose her best engineer. What he wants is someone to--to give him a nervous headache!"
"We will leave that subject alone, please," she said loftily; but when her husband joined them in the verandah, she went over ostentatiously to him and pinned a carnation in his buttonhole, hoping he would like it better than the rose she gave him the day before, which--this was in a louder tone for the doctor's benefit--he had forgotten to put in!