"I wonder if that fellow is aware of his danger?" remarked Ray, speaking to himself behind the paper he was reading before the fire in New Stone Buildings, one afternoon not long after we had returned from Scotland.
"What fellow?" I inquired.
"Why Professor Emden," he replied. "It seems that in a lecture at the London Institution last night, he announced that he had discovered a new process for the hardening of steel, which gives it no less than eight times the resisting power of the present English steel!"
"Well!" I asked, looking across at my friend, and then glancing at Vera, who had called and was seated with us, her hat still on, and a charming figure to boot.
"My dear fellow, can't you see that such an invention would be of the utmost value to our friends the Germans? They'd use it for the armour-plates of their new navy."
"H'm! And you suspect they'll try and obtain Emden's secret—eh?"
"I don't suspect, I'm confident of it," he declared, throwing aside the paper. "I suppose he's a bespectacled, unsuspicious man, like all scientists. The Times is enthusiastic over the discovery—declaring that the Admiralty should secure it at once, if they have not already done so. It's being made experimentally at Sheffield, it seems, and has been tried in secret somewhere out near the Orkneys. Admiralty experts are astounded at the results."
"Who is Emden?" I asked. "Just look at 'Who's Who?' It's by your elbow, old chap."
Ray proceeded to search the fat red book of reference, and presently exclaimed:
"It seems he's a Fellow of the Royal Society, a very distinguished chemist, and a leading authority on electro-metallurgy and ferro-alloys. He has improved upon the Kjellin furnace as installed at Krupp's at Essen, and at Vickers, Sons, and Maxim's at Sheffield, and by this improvement, it seems, has been able to invent the new steel-making process."