He put the card down gently and stared at it for some seconds. Then with some actions as deft and precise as those of an automatic machine, he addressed it in the same upstanding print letters and sealed it, pressing the ball of his right thumb firmly into the warm wax.

 He glanced across at a photograph on the polished surface of his desk, the photograph of an unusually charming-looking girl, who peeped out at him with merry impudence from behind a mass of flowers held to her breast. It was signed "Happy memories, Mercia Lyall." Just for a moment the hand that held the envelope trembled perceptibly and the frown on his forehead intensified till the deep brows almost hid his eyes. then with a sudden shrug and an irritated click of the tongues he stuffed it into his pocket and called for his car.

   Valmon Dain, even among a crowd of unusual men, would have stood out prominently as an exceptionally curious study.

  To begin with, he was admitted by the greatest scientists of the day to be one of the most extraordinary brains of the present era. Lord Marvin, president of the Royal Research society alleged him to be the little more than a cold. precise thinking machine set on an unusually finely developed human body. his faculty for putting an icy logic to bear on any problem that confronted him had expressed itself in a dozen different directions. as an inventor he had long since ceased to thrill at the newspaper descriptions of himself as the English Edison.

 The name of Valmon Dain was synonymous not only with some of the greatest inventions of modern times, but also with the giant fortune he had accumulated in exploiting them.

    For Dain was no fool where the business end of his affairs was concerned. He had read the cases of the score of other investors, the pathetic fools of genius who had worked out their lives in poverty while the overfed paunches of Big Business waxed fatter and fatter on the golden children of their fool brains. and Dain being something of the he-hawk, had set about his own business with an indifference to big Business that amounted to cold contempt. very methodically he proceeded to protect himself with patent rights in every part of the globe before putting a single invention on the market.

  To be sure, Big Business made many attempts in the early days to get its grasping claws on his Inventions, but Big Business burned it's fingers so thoroughly and so unexpectedly that it eventually that it eventually and very aggreivedly withdrew. it gave Dain up as a most unconscionable sort of an inventor.

 It was Dain's pioneering work in connection with beet crushing plant that made the sugar industry a financially sound proposition in England. His perfected method of milling steel stamped his name on a million machines throughout the world. his new carding machine abolished three-fifths of the cotton wastage in the Lancashire mills. his entirely new principles embodied in an unbelievably ingenious box of intricacy made possible the sewing on off buttons by power, and incidentally eliminated a moiety of the pitifully sweated labour in the East end.