(2)
"It is a grave thing and much considered to be," said Herr Schmoulder.
It was late at night.
They had taken Wilson Guest to the hospital, where the doctors were holding him down, as he shrieked and laughed, and died in delirium tremens.
Lord Malvin, Sir Harold Oliver, and the other scientists were gathered together in the laboratory, that recent theatre of such terrible events.
"It is a very grave thing indeed, Herr Schmoulder," Lord Malvin answered; "but I have not ventured to propose it without a consultation in the highest quarters. Decies will be here at any moment, and then upon his decision we shall act. He has been to see the King."
The distinguished men waited there silent and uneasy. All round them stood the marvellous instruments by which the late Sir William Gouldesbrough had obtained a triumph unknown before in the history of the world.
The yellow radiance of the electric light poured down upon the gleaming mahogany, brass, vulcanite and steel.
On the opposite wall was the great white screen—just an ordinary stretch of prepared canvas upon steel rollers, a dead, senseless thing, and no more than that. Yet as the least imaginative of them there chanced to turn his head and see that great white sheet, he shuddered to think of the long agony it had pictured while the two monsters had sat and taken their amusement from it, as a man takes a glass of wine.