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 for this intangible thing which was restraining them. They drooped, as though pressed down; but they remained awake and gave not a squeal nor a quiver of pain.

Surely it was painless, as well as invisible and intangible, too,—this amazing death from Stenewisc's gas.

"No trouble at all, you see," said Keeban to me. "You never know it."

He knew how horrible that gradual, invisible death was; a shot or a knife, or anything sudden, would have been ten times more merciful. It's a strange thing to say, but I'm sure that pain—some pain, at least—would have made it less terrible. It was uncanny, you see.

"They'd never have suspected it," he spoke again to me. "They'd each thought the rest were getting thick in the head and nobody would've tried to get up from the table—till they couldn't."

He was speaking of the four, who would have been in the Sencort directors' room, if I hadn't interfered; and his words, and this sight of the rabbits before me, made me see how the Englishman and the Frenchman and Teverson and Sencort would have gone, without feeling, with-