ated
his earlier cry.

"My God, Frank, what is it?"

There was no response, no answering movement or gesture. He called to
her again, but still absolute silence confronted him.

As he crept closer to her, step by step, he saw and understood.

The two luminous eyes, burning through the dark, had been his wife's.
She had been imprisoned and tied there; but bound and muffled as she
was, the strength of her desire, the supremacy of will, had created its
new and mysterious wire of communication. Some passion of want, some
sheer intensity of feeling, had found and used its warning semaphore.
She had spoken to him, without sound or movement. Yet for what?

Yet for what? That was the thought that seemed to dance back and forth
across the foreground of his busy brain. That was what he wondered and
demanded of himself as he clambered and struggled and panted up the
wall into the narrow and dusty alcove, and cut away the sodden gag
between her aching jaws. The tender flesh was indented and livid,
where the tightened band had pressed in under the cheek-bones. The
salivated throat was swollen, and speechless. The tongue protruded
pitifully, helpless in its momentary paralysis.

"Oh, he'll smart for this! By heaven, he'll smart for this!" declared
Durkin, as he stooped and cut away the straps that bound her ankles to
the obdurate iron, and severed the bands that bruised and held her
white wrists. Even then she could not speak, though she smiled a
little, faintly and forlornly and gratefully. She struggled to say one
word, but it resolved itself into a cacophonous and inarticulate
mumble, half-infantile, half-imbecile.

"Oh, he'll pay for this!" repeated the raging man, as he lowered her,
limp and inert, to the floor below and leaped down beside her. She
sank back with a happy but husky gasp of weakness, for the benumbed
muscles refused to obey, and the cramped and stiffened limbs were
unable to support her.

All she could do was to hold her husband's hand in her own, in a
grateful yet passionate grip. She must have been imprisoned there, he
surmised, at least an hour, perhaps two hours, perhaps even longer.

He started up, in search for water. It might be, he felt, that a lead
water-pipe ran somewhere about them. He would cut it without
compunction.

He took two steps across the room, when an audible and terrified note
of warning broke from her swollen lips. He darted back to her, in
wonder, searching her