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 catch me! In a minute Carson will arrive and begin talking about becoming a big man and that sort of thing.”

He sat down morosely on the palliasse and waited. When no one appeared he sat like a thief at the desk and began again on the barium salt. Anyway, he was here for the last time, he told himself. The attempt proved perfectly successful: the stuff burst with a long tongue of flame and cracked the glass case containing the balance. “Now I shall catch it,” he said to himself guiltily, when he saw the extent of the damage, and crept out of the laboratory like a schoolboy who had broken a window. Outside it was already dusk and a fine rain was falling. Ten paces in front of the shed stood a military guard.

Prokop slowly walked back to the castle along the road by which he had come. The park was deserted; a fine rain hissed in the branches of the trees, lights began to appear in the castle and the triumphant notes of a piano resounded in the darkness. Prokop made his way to a lonely part of the park between the main entrance and the terrace. Here all the paths had been overgrown and he plunged into the wet underbrush like a boar, every now and then stopping for a moment to listen and then making a way for himself again through the crackling bushes. At last he reached the edge of this jungle where the bushes stretched over an old wall not more than nine feet high. Prokop seized an overhanging branch so as to drop from it onto the other side of the wall; but under his solid weight the branch gave way with a sharp crack like a pistol shot, and Prokop fell heavily onto qa sort of rubbish heap.