Stones don't grow out of one another in this way. It's .. . it's uncanny."

"Stones don't carry you five miles through the air,usually," Arglay said drily. "I think you're straining at a gnat. Still The perfect ease with which the Stone had recreated itself, a ghastly feeling of its capacity to go on producing copies of itself to infinity, the insane simplicity, the grotesque finality, of the result, weighed on his mind, and he fell silent.

Sir Giles, alert and eager, picked them up. "Just a moment," he said, "let me weigh them."

He went to a corner of the room where a small balance stood in a glass case, and put one of the Stones on the scales. For a minute he stared at it, then he looked over his shoulder at the Chief Justice.

"I say, Arglay," he cried, "it doesn't weigh anything."

"Doesn't weigh-" Lord Arglay went across to him. The Stone lay in the middle of the scale, which remained perfectly poised, balanced against its fellow, apparently unweighted by what it bore.

"But-" Arglay said, "but- But it does weigh. . . . I mean I can feel its pressure if I hold it. Very light, but definite."

"Well, there you are," Giles said. "Look at it." With the tweezers he picked up a gramme weight and dropped it on the other scale, which immediately sank gently under it.

"There," he said, "the balances are all right. ltjust doesn't weigh." He took up the Stone and they returned to the table, where all three stood staring at the marvel, until Sir Giles grew impatient.

"We look like Hottentots staring at an aeroplane," he said. "Reginald, you baboon-headed cockatoo, show a little gratitude. Here instead of a mere chip you can give every one of your degenerate Jew millionaires a stone as big as the first one, and you stand gaping like a cow with the foot-and-mouth disease."

Reginald made an effort at recovery. "Yes," he answered rather quaveringly, "yes, of course I see that. It made me feel funny somehow. But-yes, of course. It'll save any difficulty about chipping the original, and they'll look much better-much. Can I leave them here to-night?"

"Why, you're scared out of what wits you've got," Sir Giles said. "What about you, Arglay? Will you have one?"

"No," Lord Arglay said soberly. "I think not; not to-night. I feel rather as if I'd been scared out of what wits I'd got, and was just getting over it. If I were you, Reginald, I should think a great many times before I started that transport scheme of yours."

"Eh?" said Reginald. "But surely Sir Giles is right? This'll make it even easier."

"Just as you like," Lord Arglay said. "I think I will go now, Tumulty. I should like to come and see it again soon, if I may." Sir Giles nodded casually, and as casually bade his visitors good-night.

On the way back to town Lord Arglay said very little, and ignored Reginald's occasional outbreaks of mingled hope and nervousness.