plans."

Prescott, far from losing his nerve, turned on us bitterly. "I knew
you two were spies the moment I saw you," he shouted. "It seemed as if
in some way I knew you for what you were, as if I knew you had seen
Mr. Haswell before you came to me. You, too, would have robbed an
inventor as I am sure he would. But have a care, both of you. You may
be punished also by blindness for your duplicity. Who knows?"

A shudder passed over me at the horrible thought contained in his
mocking laugh. Were we doomed to blindness, too? I looked at the
sightless man on the bed in alarm.

"I knew that you would know us," retorted Kennedy calmly. "Therefore
we came provided with spectacles of Euphos glass, precisely like those
you wear. No, Prescott, we are safe, though perhaps we may have some
burns like those red blotches on Mr. Haswell, light burns."

Prescott had fallen back a step and Mrs. Martin was making an effort
to appear stately and end the interview.

"No," continued Craig, suddenly wheeling, and startling us by the
abruptness of his next exposure, "it is you and your wife here--Mrs.
Prescott, not Mrs. Martin--who must have a care. Stop glaring at each
other. It is no use playing at enemies longer and trying to get rid of
us. You overdo it. The game is up."

Prescott made a rush at Kennedy, who seized him by the wrist and held
him tightly in a grasp of steel that caused the veins on the back of
his hands to stand out like whipcords.

"This is a deep-laid plot," he went on calmly, still holding Prescott,
while I backed up against the door and cut off his wife; "but it is
not so difficult to see it after all. Your part was to destroy the
eyesight of the old man, to make it necessary for him to call on his
daughter. Your wife's part was to play the role of Mrs. Martin, whom
he had not seen for years and could not see now. She was to persuade
him, with her filial affection, to make her the beneficiary of his
will, to see that his money was kept readily convertible into cash.

"Then, when the old man was at last out of the way, you two could
decamp with what you could realize before the real daughter cut off
somewhere across the continent could hear of the death of her father.
It was an excellent scheme. But Haswell's plain material newspaper
advertisement was not so effective for your purposes, Prescott, as the
more artistic 'telepagram,' as you call it. Although you two got in
first in answering the advertisement,