Hartmann came to him. "What is it, Mayer?" he asked, eagerly.
His assistant extended the handkerchief to him. Grace realized with a sinking heart that it was one of several she had herself embroidered during the weeks preceding her marriage. With what pride, she reflected, she had worked over the G and D, lovingly intertwined in one corner. "His wife!" she heard Hartmann cry, with a harsh laugh. "That explains everything. That was why he did not leave Brussels at once—he was waiting for her—he would not go without her." He turned to Grace with a new expression on his face. "So you are his wife, eh? Very well. Now we shall see whether or not you will tell me what I want to know. Your husband is confined in the room below us. This"—he indicated the small black box with wires attached—"is a device which I have constructed for producing certain light rays—light rays which have a marvelous power, both for curing, and producing disease. Look!" He held his powerful hand before her eyes. "This is what they did to me, before I discovered how to control them." She saw, stretching across the back of his hand and wrist, a broad red patch, like the scar remaining after a burn. "Now come here." He seized her by the wrist and dragged her toward the apparatus at the center of the room. "Look—in there." He indicated a short brass tube which rose from the center of the box, resembling the eyepiece of a microscope. "Look!"
Grace bent over and applied her eye to the brass tube, then shrank back with an exclamation of horror. "Richard!" she screamed, then turned on Hartmann with the fury of a tigress. "Let him go—let him go—I say, or I will—" She realized her helplessness—the futility of her threats, and fell into the chair in a paroxysm of sobbing. Through the brass tube, and the powerful lens which focused the light rays upon the space below, she had seen Richard's face, white and drawn, within a disk of blinding light, and apparently so near to her that she could have reached out and touched it. In her momentary glance, she noted his reddened eyes, the tears which coursed from beneath their lids, the agony which distorted his countenance.
"Now will you tell me what I ask?" cried Hartmann, triumphantly.
Still she made no reply. Her heart was breaking, her suffering at the knowledge of his suffering made her faint and weak, but even now she could not bring herself to break the trust which Monsieur Lefevre had placed in her. She sat huddled up in the chair, shaking from head to foot with sobs.
Hartmann saw that her resistance was as yet unbroken. "Take her arm, Mayer," he called out, as he seized her by one wrist. "Come along now. We'll see if a closer view will have any effect." He snatched up a broad leather strap from a shelf along the wall, then, with Mayer's assistance, half-led, half dragged her to the iron stairway in the corner. In a few moments they had paused before the door of the room where the detective lay confined. Hartmann threw it open and pushed Grace inside, while he and Mayer followed, closing the door behind them.
For a moment Grace was dazzled by the brightness of the light cone, and the darkness of the remainder of the room. Then seeing Richard lying helpless on the floor before her, she threw herself to her knees, put her arms about his neck, and covered his face with kisses. "My darling—my poor boy!" she cried, as she bent over him, her shoulders shutting off from his tortured face the blinding rays of the light. "What have they done to you?"
CHAPTER XX
Grace had remained upon her knees beside the prostrate figure of her husband but a moment, when she was torn away by Hartmann and his assistant, and before she realized their intention, the former had slipped about her waist the broad leather strap he had brought from the room above, and was busy securing it to an iron staple fixed in the wall at one side of the room. Then he stood back and surveyed the scene with a smile of satisfaction.