make use of the means he had so unwisely thrown in his way? He turned
about, half maddened.

"Girl!" he cried, "I must see the old man! Where is he?"

He couldn't see him, she whined. He was asleep up there, on the table.
At one o'clock he had said he would wake up.

He pushed past her, mounted to the long room, pressed open the
unfastened door, and entered.

The old man and the corpse of his former self lay together under the
light of a lamp that swung from the beam overhead. An insulated carbon
point was directed to each white, still breast. From the old man's
hand a cord ran to a key beyond, arranged to make or break connection
at a touch. By it stood a clock, with a simple mechanism attached that
bore upon a second key like the first, evidently planned to press upon
it when the hands should mark a given hour. The child had said that he
would wake at one, and it was now past midnight.

Ronald Wyde comprehended it all now. The wily old man's feeble life
had been withdrawn into the great magnet, and mixed therein with what
remained of his own. In less than an hour the key would fall, and the
double stream would flow into and animate his young body, which would
then wake to renewed life; while the cast-off shell beside it, worn to
utter uselessness by a toilsome century, would be left to moulder as a
mothed garment.

Surely no time was to be lost; his life depended upon instant action.
And yet, comprehending this, he went to work slowly, and as a
somnambulist might, acting almost by instinct, and well knowing that a
blunder now meant irrevocable death.

Carefully disengaging the cord from the old man's yet warm grasp, and
setting the carbon point aside, he lifted the shrivelled corpse and
bore it away, to cast it on the white rubbish-heap in one corner.
Returning to his work, he stripped himself, and laid down in the old
man's place. As he did so, the distant Minster bells rang the
three-quarters.

Was there yet time?

He braced his shoulders firmly against the brass plate under them,
and moved the carbon point steadily back to its place, with its tip
resting on his breast; the silk-wrapped wire that dangled between
it and the magnet quivering, as he did so, as with conscious life.
Drawing a long breath, he tightened the cord, and heard a faint click
as the key snapped down.

The same sharp sting as before instantly pricked his breast, tingling
thrills pulsed over him, beats of light and shadow swept before