eagerly to the Professor.

"Where is this body--this experiment?" he demanded.

Daimler shook his head. Evidently he had acknowledged failure and did
not intend to drag his dead man before our eyes, unless he could bring
that man forth alive, upright, and ready to join our conversation!

"I've put it away," he said distantly. "There is nothing more to be
done, now that our reverend doctor has insisted in making a matter of
fact thing out of our experiment. You understand, I had not intended to
go in for wholesale resurrection, even if I had met with success. It was
my belief that a dead body, like a dead piece of mechanism, can be
brought to life again, provided we are intelligent enough to discover
the secret. And by God, it is _still_ my belief!"

* * * * *

That was the situation, then, when M. S. and I paced slowly back along
the narrow street that contained the Professor's dwelling-place. My
companion was strangely silent. More than once I felt his eyes upon me
in an uncomfortable stare, yet he said nothing. Nothing, that is, until
I had opened the conversation with some casual remark about the lunacy
of the man we had just left.

"You are wrong in mocking him, Dale," M. S. replied bitterly. "Daimler
is a man of science. He is no child, experimenting with a toy; he is a
grown man who has the courage to believe in his powers. One of these
days...."

He had intended to say that some day I should respect the Professor's
efforts. One of these days! The interval of time was far shorter than
anything so indefinite. The first event, with its succeeding series of
horrors, came within the next three minutes.

* * * * *

We had reached a more deserted section of the square, a black,
uninhabited street extending like a shadowed band of darkness between
gaunt, high walls. I had noticed for some time that the stone structure
beside us seemed to be unbroken by door or window--that it appeared to
be a single gigantic building, black and forbidding. I mentioned the
fact to M. S.

"The warehouse," he said simply. "A lonely, God-forsaken place. We shall
probably see the flicker of the watchman's light in one of the upper
chinks."

At his words, I glanced up. True enough, the higher part of the grim
structure was punctured by narrow, barred openings. Safety vaults,
probably. But the light, unless its tiny gleam was somewhere in the
inner recesses of the ware