“Please!” gasped the dying man. “I want her—my Aña!”
Sir Basil sucked in his breath sharply. “What’s this? Have you been making love to Aña again, after my warning to you?”
The sufferer stirred uneasily. “No!” he panted. “But perhaps my hour of release has come, and I want to look at her—once more.”
The scientist smiled unpleasantly as he eyed the magnificent body which looked like a broken statue in bronze.
“Some human characteristics are strange,” he muttered. “In spite of everything I do, this fellow continues to love Aña: Aña whom I intend for myself.”
He stepped to the apparatus and swiftly changed one of the adjustments.
“Perhaps,” he resumed, with a gleam in his eyes that chilled Hale, “this will forever cure him.”
In another moment, the still, half-dead body was lifted and gently slipped into a compartment.
Before Hale’s horrified gaze fastened on the eye-piece which revealed moving pictures of every process that went on within, Unani Assu’s body was reduced almost instantly to a fine, silvery dust.