“Yes,—if you are indeed a student of Nature, you surely know that! And you know also that the greatest, deepest, most amazing, and most enlightening discoveries made in science during the last thirty years or so are merely the result of cautious and sometimes casual probing of one or two of this vast Nature’s smaller cells of active intelligence. We have done something,—but how much remains to do!”
He paused,—and Diana gazed at him questioningly. He smiled as he met her eager and interested look.
“We shall have plenty of time to talk of these matters,” he said—“if I decide that you can be useful to me. What languages do you know besides your own?”
“French, Italian and a little Russian,” she answered. “The two first quite fluently,—Russian I have studied only quite lately—and I find it rather difficult——”
“Being a Russian myself I can perhaps make it easy for you,” said Dimitrius, kindly. “To study such a language without a teacher shows considerable ambition and energy on your part.”
She flushed a little at the mere suggestion of praise and sat silent.
“I presume you have quite understood, Miss May,” he presently resumed, in a more formal tone, “that I require the services of an assistant for one year at least—possibly two years. If I engage you, you must sign an agreement with me to that effect. Another very special point is that of confidence. Nothing that you do, see, or hear while working under my instructions is ever to pass your lips. You must maintain the most inviolable secrecy, and when once you are in this house you must neither write letters nor receive them. If you are, as I suggested in my advertisement, ‘alone in the world, without any claims on your time or your affections,’ you will not find this a hardship. My experiments in chemistry may or may not give such results as I hope for, but while I am engaged upon them I want no imitative bunglers attempting to get on the same line. Therefore I will run no risks of even the smallest hint escaping as to the nature of my work.”
Diana bent her head in assent.
“I understand,” she said—“And I am quite willing to agree to your rules. I should only wish to write one letter, and that I can do from the hotel,—just to return the money my friend lent me for my expenses. And I should ask you to advance me that sum out of whatever salary you offer. Then I need give no further account of myself. Sophy,—that is my friend—would write to acknowledge receipt of the money, and then our correspondence would end.”
“This would not vex or worry you?” inquired Dimitrius.