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revelations. She gave him no information.”
    Pepe had also had an idea of finding out where the shop’s stock-in-trade was manufactured. Now he knew, and so did Harrison. Neither of them was much happier for the information. Apparently Valerie did not share it. She laughed a little.
    “Ah, but he tried to find out where he could get such goods! He squirmed and sidled and tried innumerable tricks! He said he would like to have special items made. My aunt told him that she would take his order. Then he confessed that he was actually a dealer—as if she had not known!—and offered a price for information about the manufacturer!”
    Pepe had intended something of this sort, too. Harrison listened emotionally to the sound of Valerie’s voice.
    “In the end,” said Valerie pleasurably, “they struck a bargain. On my aunt’s terms! He is well known as an art dealer in England and in America. It is a splendid bit of business. She will order such items as he desires. He will pay extravagantly. My aunt suspects that he will probably age them artificially and sell them as true antiques. She does not do that, because she does not wish for trouble with the authorities. But what he does with them is not her affair. Still, she put heavy prices upon them!”
    Harrison mumbled. Valerie continued:
    “He bought all the very best items in the shop. More than my uncle just brought back! It will be necessary for him to make another trip immediately to get more!”
    “Maybe,” said Harrison, “it was good humor brought about by a good business deal that made her agree to let us come here today.”
    “ Mais non ,” said Valerie wisely. “It was M. Carroll! Anyone but my aunt would be fond of him. But he angers her. He is not practical, and above all things my aunt is practical! Yet even she dares to go only so far! He told her that she must not offend you. He said that you were important to probable developments in the shop. He said that if you were offended, he would take measures. Ah, but my aunt was angry! She brooded all the way back from St. Jean-sur-Seine! She likes to direct. She does not like to be directed.”
    Harrison did not want to think, with Valerie, of St. Jean-sur-Seine and the ghastly possibilities implied by the confirmation of all his most implausible suspicions. He wanted to think only of Valerie. But thinking of Valerie made him think of disasters that might come to her.
    A soldier and a girl went by, and Harrison considered morbidly what could be the result of a mere few boxes of percussion-caps upon the history of Europe and the world, if they happened to be demonstrated ahead of their normal time.
    Napoleon was not receptive to the idea of submarines, to be sure. The American Fulton had found that out. But he would grasp instantly the advantage of percussion-cap guns over the flint-locks his infantry used. Flint-locks, in action, missed fire three times in ten. Merely changing muskets to percussion guns would make the increased fire-power of his armies equivalent to two hundred thousand added soldiers. Napoleon would not miss a bet like that! There would be no trouble with manufacture. The technology of the early nineteenth century was quite up to the making of percussion-caps once the idea and the proof of its practicality was known.
    Even one box of percussion-caps, put into the proper hands in 1804, would mean that the invasion of Russia in 1812 would be successful. The Russian armies would not be defeated, they would be destroyed. There would be no abdication. There would be no Hundred Days. Waterloo would never be fought. A million Frenchmen would not die before their reasonable time, and instead would live to become fathers instead of the left-overs from whom modern Frenchmen were descended. And of course the probability of exactly those persons marrying, who had married in the past that Harrison knew of, and of their having exactly those children they’d begotten in that same past, and of Valerie