- -

Ellen turned away from him and her lips trembled. His gentle thrust
had hurt her.

"But I would have sworn it was your voice, Lee," she said. "And--I
still think it was!"

"I tell you I didn't phone you to meet me in Washington Square!"

"But you told me you had talked with Barter for a long time on the
headquarters phone, didn't you? Remember that you are dealing with the
cleverest and maddest brain we know of to-day. What if he had merely
talked with you to get a record of your voice? Suppose a voice were
composed of certain ingredients, certain sounds. Suppose those
ingredients could somehow be captured on a sensitized plate of some
kind! Edison would have been burned as a sorcerer a few centuries
before he invented the wax record. Twenty years ago who would have
thought of talking pictures ... voices permanently recorded on
celluloid?"

"But the talkie films merely parrot, over and over again, the words of
actual people. When I talked with Barter this morning I certainly said
nothing about meeting you at Washington Square."

"But the tone, the timber, the frequency of your voice! Lee, suppose
he had gone a step further than the talkies and had found a way to
break the voice apart and put it back together to suit himself...?"

"Good Lord, Ellen! It sounds crazy ... but if you would have sworn
that voice was mine, then mine it may have been, speaking words with
my voice that I never spoke personally. But wait until we find out for
sure. We're just guessing."

But the idea stuck in his mind and he believed in it enough to tell
Tyler, upon arriving at the Hervey residence, to warn every man named
on the list of the Mind Master to make no appointments over the
telephone, no matter how sure they were of the voices at the other end
of the wire.

It sounded wild, but was it?

- - -

That night Ellen and Bentley occupied rooms which faced each other
across the hall in a midtown hotel, and plain-clothes men were on duty
to right and left in the hall. There were men on the roof and in the
lobby, in the garage, everywhere skulkers might be expected to look
for coigns of vantage from which to proceed against Ellen Estabrook.
Bentley knew quite well that Barter would not drop his intention
against Ellen, especially since he had failed once already.

Tyler and Bentley sat in Bentley's room drinking black coffee and
discussing their plans for the next day. The latest paper had
contained anot