She did not speak. There are times when even a woman feels the advantages of silence. But she gazed upon her late admirer and then upon Bill. She had to acknowledge to her inner consciousness that her own husband cut much the better figure of the two.
Round and round swept the cylinder, its fierce currents and their fated victim.
The features of the mystic were no longer recognizable. The contortions and distortions of body, limbs and features were fearful. The external application of electricity and the internal throes of passion and pain have done their fatal work.
Again and again an increased current, regulated by the avenger, hastened in exact ratio the destruction of the astral man.
The victim first lost control, limb by limb, of his entire organism. Then his voice failed. When he would have called to his Lady-bird, speech was silenced--paralyzed. Nothing of sound but a gurgling, hissing whisper issued from that tiny hole--no longer a human mouth. Only the eyes lived. In that small, corrugated sphere, once a perfect head, was left nothing now that was human, nothing of human intelligence save the eyes--two gleaming sparks of light--and even these, receding and diminishing, gave evidence of the vanishing soul. So long, however, as these two glittering points shone through the vapor mask that had been a face, they sought and chilled the marrow of the disillusioned Imogene.
So long as these two points of intelligence burned in that misshapen ball they rested only upon her, and then--finally as the sodden curtains of phlogisticated matter fell before those windows of the soul and conscious love was swallowed up in vapor, she for whom this tragedy was enacted fell shrieking across the cask of copper wire.
Conversation ceased in the death chamber. The cylinder continued to whirl--dizzily, madly, satanically. Sheets of crackling sparks, blue and wicked, streamed out from that insatiable monster. The full current was on. Every horse-power was let loose. The silent but resistless force of electricity was unchained. And the victim of this awful experiment was no longer a man. It was now but a shape, a cloud, a vapor, a shadow.
There was now but a spinning mass of vapor, a shape no larger than an infant that shot in and out of the laboratory, obedient to the avenger's hand. The rapid revolutions in that fearful orbit traced out a misty band of cloud. That central cylinder became the hub of a huge spokeless wheel.