“Well!” he said.—“Courageous as ever?”
“Is there anything to be afraid of?” she asked. “To me it looks wonderful!—beautiful!”
“Yes—it is the essence of all wonder and all beauty,” he answered. “It is a form of condensed light,—the condensation which, when imprisoned by natural forces within a mine under certain conditions, gives you rubies, diamonds and other precious stones. And in the water beneath, which you cannot see just now, owing to the vapour, there is sufficient radium to make me ten times a millionaire.”
“And you will not part with any of it?”
“I do part with some of it when I find it useful to do so,” he said. “But very seldom. I am gradually testing its real properties. The scientists will perhaps be five hundred years at work discussing and questioning what I may prove in a single day! But I do not wish to enter upon these matters with you,—you are my ‘subject,’ as you know, and I want to prepare you. The time has come when you must be ready for anything——”
“I am!” she interrupted, quickly.
“You respond eagerly!”—and he fixed his eyes upon her with a strange, piercing look. “But that is because you are strong and defiant of fate. You are beginning to experience that saving vanity which deems itself indestructible!”
She made no answer. She lifted her eyes to the highest point of the slowly turning wheel, and its opaline flare falling through the rose mist gave her face an unearthly lustre.
“We are going to Davos Platz,” he continued, “because it will not do to remain here through the winter. I want the finest, clearest air, rarefied and purified by the constant presence of ice and snow, to aid me in my experiment,—moreover, certain changes in you will soon become too apparent to escape notice, and people will talk. Already Baroness Rousillon is beginning to ask questions——”
“About me?” asked Diana, amused.