lent for a time. Finally Miss Thorne walked over to the
long table and curiously lifted one of the spheroids. It was a sinister
looking thing, nickeled, glittering. At one end of it was a delicate,
vibratory apparatus, not unlike the transmitter of a telephone, and the
other end was threaded, as if the spheroid was made as an attachment to
some other device.

"With that we control the world!" exclaimed the man triumphantly. "And
it's mine, Rosa, mine!"

"It's wonderful!" she mused softly. "Wonderful! And now I must go. I may
not see you again until after the test, because I shall be watched and
followed wherever I go. If I get an opportunity I shall reach you by
telephone, but not even that unless it is necessary. There is always
danger, always danger!" she repeated thoughtfully. She was thinking of
Mr. Grimm.

"I understand," said the man simply.

"And look out for the signal--the light in the apex of the capitol
dome," she went on. "I understand the night must be perfectly clear; and
_you_ understand that the test is to be made promptly at three o'clock
by your chronometer?"

"At three o'clock," he repeated.

For a moment they stood with their arms around each other, then tenderly
his visitor kissed him, and went out. He remained looking after her
vacantly until the chug-chug of her automobile, as it moved off down the
road, was lost in the distance, then turned again to the long
work-table.

VIII

MISS THORNE AND NOT MISS THORNE

From a pleasant, wide-open bay-window of her apartments on the second
floor, Miss Thorne looked out upon the avenue with inscrutable eyes.
Behind the closely drawn shutters of another bay-window, farther down
the avenue, on the corner, she knew a man named Hastings was hiding; she
knew that for an hour or more he had been watching her as she wrote. In
the other direction, in a house near the corner, another man named Blair
was similarly ensconced, and he, too, had been watching as she wrote.
There should be a third man, Johnson. Miss Thorne curiously studied the
face of each passer-by, seeking therein something to remember.

She sat at the little mahogany desk and a note with the ink yet wet
upon it lay face up before her. It was addressed to Signor Pietro
Petrozinni in the district prison, and read:

"My Dear Friend:

"I have been waiting to write you with the hope that I could report
Senor Alvarez out of danger, but his condition, I regret to say, remains
unchanged