Part 12

"Why limited?" asked Sacharissa.

"Why not?" replied her sister, warmly.

"Well, what does your young man mean by limited?"

"I suppose," said Linda, "that he means it is to be the limit. Don't you, William?"

"Certainly," said Destyn, gravely; and the motion was put and carried.

"Rissa, dear!"

The chair casually recognized her younger sister.

"I propose that the object of this society be to make its members very, very wealthy."

The motion was carried; Linda picked up a scrap of paper and began to figure up the possibility of a new touring car.

Then Destyn arose; the chair nodded to him and leaned back, playing a tattoo with her pencil tip against her snowy teeth.

He began in his easy, agreeable voice, looking across at his pretty wife:

"You know, dearest--and Sacharissa, over there, is also aware--that, in the course of my economical experiments in connection with your father's Wireless Trust, I have accidentally discovered how to utilize certain brand-new currents of an extraordinary character."

Sacharissa's expression became skeptical; Linda watched her husband in unfeigned admiration.

"These new and hitherto unsuspected currents," continued Destyn modestly, "are not electrical but psychical. Yet, like wireless currents, their flow eternally encircles the earth. These currents, I believe, have their origin in that great unknown force which, for lack of a better name, we call fate, or predestination. And I am convinced that by intercepting one of these currents it is possible to connect the subconscious personalities of two people of opposite sex who, although ultimately destined for one another since the beginning of things, have, through successive incarnations, hitherto missed the final consummation-- marriage!--which was the purpose of their creation."

"Bill, dear," sighed Linda, "how exquisitely you explain the infinite."

"Fudge!" said Sacharissa; "go on, William."

"That's all," said Destyn. "We agreed to put in a thousand dollars apiece for me to experiment with. I've perfected the instrument--here it is."

He drew from his waistcoat pocket a small, flat jeweler's case and took out a delicate machine resembling the complicated interior of a watch.

"Now," he said, "with this tiny machine concealed in my waistcoat pocket, I walk up to any man and, by turning a screw like the stem of a watch, open the microscopical receiver. Into the receiver flow all psychical emanations from that unsuspicious citizen. The machine is charged, positively. Then I saunter up to some man, place the instrument on a table--like that--touch a lever. Do you see that hair wire of Rosium uncoil like a tentacle? It is searching, groping for the invisible, negative, psychical current which will carry its message."

"To whom?" asked Sacharissa.

"To the subconscious personality of the only woman for whom he was created, the only woman on earth whose psychic personality is properly attuned to intercept that wireless greeting and respond to it."

"How can you tell whether she responds?" asked Sacharissa, incredulously. He pointed to the hair wire of Rosium:

"I watch that. The instant that the psychical current reaches and awakens her, crack!--a minute point of blue incandescence tips the tentacle. It's done; psychical communication is established. And that man and that woman, wherever they may be on earth, surely, inexorably, will be drawn together, even from the uttermost corners of the world, to fulfill that for which they were destined since time began."

There was a semirespectful silence; Linda looked at the little jewel-like machine with a slight shudder; Sacharissa shrugged her young shoulders.

"How much of this," said she, "is theory and how much is fact?--for, William, you always were something of a poet."

"I don't know. A month ago I tried it on your father's footman, and in a week he'd married a perfectly strange parlor maid."

"Oh, they do such things, anyway," observed Sacharissa, and added, unconvinced: "Did that tentacle burn blue?"

"It certainly did," said Destyn.