r it is. Here is your
apartment. You will stay here until Roger gives further orders
concerning you."

The living automaton opened a door and stood silent and impassive, while
Clio, staring at her in unutterable horror, shrank past her and into the
sumptuously furnished suite. The door closed soundlessly and utter
silence descended as a pall. Not an ordinary silence, but the
indescribable perfection of the absolute, complete absence of all sound.
In that silence Clio stood motionless. Tense and rigid, hopeless,
despairing, she stood there in that magnificent room, fighting an almost
overwhelming impulse to scream. Suddenly she heard the cold voice of
Roger, speaking from the empty air.

"You are over-wrought, Miss Marsden. You can be of no use to yourself or
to me in that condition. I command you to rest; and, to insure that
rest, you may pull that cord, which will establish about this room an
ether wall: a wall cutting off even this my voice...."

The voice ceased as she pulled the cord savagely and threw herself upon
a divan in a torrent of gasping, strangling, but rebellious sobs. Then
again came a voice, but not to her ears. Deep within her, pervading
every bone and muscle, it made itself felt rather than heard.

"Clio?" it asked. "Don't talk yet...."

"Conway!" she gasped in relief, every fiber of her being thrilled into
new hope at the deep, well-remembered voice of Conway Costigan.

"Keep still!" he snapped. "Don't act so happy! He may have a spy-ray on
you. He can't hear me, but he may be able to hear you. When he was
talking to you you must have noticed a sort of rough, sandpapery feeling
under that necklace I gave you? Since he's got an ether-wall around you
the beads are dead now. If you feel anything like that under the
wrist-watch, breathe deeply, twice. If you don't feel anything there,
it's safe for you to talk, as loud as you please.

"I don't feel a thing, Conway!" she rejoiced. Tears forgotten, she was
her old, buoyant self again. "So that wall _is_ real, after all? I only
about half believed it."

"Don't trust it too much, because he can cut it off from the outside any
time he wants to. Remember what I told you: that necklace will warn you
of any spy-ray in the ether, and the watch will detect anything below
the level of the ether. It's dead now, of course, since our three phones
are direct-connected; I'm in touch with Bradley, too. Don't be too
scared; we've got a lot better chance that I th