Sister Edouard-Antoine had spoken. Hector rose up and saluted as the nun came gliding down the avenue of beds towards them, her beads clattering and swinging by her side, her black robes sweeping the well-scrubbed boards, her finger raised in admonition, solicitude on the mild face within the coif of starched white linen....
“They shall be obeyed, my Sister,” said de Moulny in an elaborate whisper. The Sister smiled and nodded, and went back to her work. Hector, on a rush-bottomed chair by the low bed, holding the hot, thin, bony hand, began to say:
“I went out yesterday—being Wednesday. Paris is looking as she always looks—always will look, until England and Russia and Germany join forces to invade France, and batter down her forts and spike her batteries, and pound her churches and towers and palaces to powder with newly-invented projectiles, bigger than any shell the world has ever yet seen, filled with some fulminate of a thousand times the explosive power of gunpowder....”
“Go it!” whispered de Moulny. Then a spark of fanatical enthusiasm kindled in his pale blue eyes. “An explosive of a thousand times the power of gunpowder, you say!” he repeated. “Remember that inspection, and the grimy neck and black hands that cost me my Corporal’s galon! I had been working in the Department of Chemistry that morning.... I had got all that black on me through a blow-up in the laboratory. Nom d’un petit bonhomme! I thought I had discovered it—then!—that explosive that is to send gunpowder to the wall. Listen——”
“Do not excite yourself!” begged Hector, “or the Sister will turn me out.”
De Moulny went on: “I shall pursue the thing no further, for how shall one who is to be a Catholic priest spend his time inventing explosives to destroy men? But—one day you may take up the thread of discovery where I left off.”
“Or where the discovery went off!” suggested Hector.
De Moulny grinned, though his eyes were serious.
“Just so. But listen. I had been reading of the experiments made in 1832 by Braconnot of Nancy, who converted woody fiber into a highly-combustible body by treating it with nitric acid. And I dipped a piece of carded cotton-wool in nitric, and washed it. Then I dipped it in concentrated sulphuric. The sulphuric not only dehydrated the nitric—saisissez?—but took up the water. Then it occurred to me to test the expansive power of the substance in combustion by packing it into a paper cone and lighting it. Well, I was packing the stuff with the end of an aluminum spatula, into the little paper case, when—but you must have heard?”
“Ps’st! Br’roum! Boum!” Hector nodded. “I heard, most certainly! But let me now tell you of Wednesday.” He leaned forwards, gripping the seat of the rush-bottomed chair between his knees with his strong supple red hands as he had gripped the edge of the prison stool, and his bright black eyes were eager on de Moulny’s.