Page:Weird Tales Volume 5 Number 1 (1925-01).djvu/19

18 will be remembered, made such a sensation in the last year of the war for the keenness of its sensitive imagination, had so far taken no part in the discussion. Now he suddenly broke in, speaking with sharp conviction.

"But that's absurd!" he said. "Why, the other door might have led to freedom, for all they knew!"

"That's exactly where it did lead," the soldier finished quietly. "I told you that the German was reputed to be a pretty considerable expert in frightfulness. You see, none of them had the courage (and they were brave men, too, or they couldn't have been spies in wartime) to face the horror of the unknown. They chose the death they knew."

For a time there was silence. Each of his bearers was interpreting the story in accordance with his own thoughts.

"I wonder, I wonder," Dr. Ainsworth muttered, half to himself, "I wonder."

INCLAIR was taken by surprize when Dr. Ainsworth invited him to dine at his house about a month later. He had never been able to determine whether the doctor objected to him personally, or whether the natural reluctance of a man of fixed habits to lose an efficient and charming housekeeper accounted for the doctor's strong hostility to Sinclair's engagement to his niece. As the date of their wedding approached, the scientist's opposition intensified rather than diminished, so that when he went out of his way to invite the young man to dinner, the latter surprizedly wondered whether this was to be construed as a flag of truce.

At any rate, on this occasion the doctor showed not the slightest sign of hostility. At dinner, seated with his guest on one side of him while Mildred, his niece, faced him at the other end of the table, he was affability itself. Dr. Ainsworth enjoyed a European reputation as a man of science, and in the course of his career he had managed to rub shoulders with most of the celebrities of the continent. When he chose to exert himself, his reminiscences of men and manners were well worthy of attention.

After the port had gone round the table, Mildred left the two men with their cigars, with an admonition not to be too long before joining her in the drawing room.

When she had left the room, the doctor passed the decanter again to his guest and continued to engage him in close conversation. By the time that an inch and a half of white ash showed at the end of his cigar, he pushed back his chair and rose from the table.

"Before we join Mildred, I should like you to see one or two little things in my laboratory, which I believe may interest you," he remarked, and led the way upstairs, past the door of the drawing room, to the top floor of the house, which was given up entirely to his researches.

Sinelair had never entered the laboratory before. His first impression was a swift recollection of schoolboy days, when he had worked in a room that presented just such an unbroken array of bottles and balances and strange-looking instruments, except that here there seemed to be more of them. His attention was attracted by a line of cases on the right of the room apparently containing a series of wax-works, of which he did not immediately appreciate the significance. It was as he was moving over to examine these that he first became aware of a strange sensation of dizziness stealing over him. The room darkened and he felt that he was about to fall. The voice of his host sounded for a moment as from an immense distance before it trailed off into nothingness.