Through the Ether.
“Hush! You infernal idiot! What did I tell you? What the deuce are you doing?” cried the man, tearing the telephone from the woman’s hand and throwing over a switch upon the roll-top desk at which she was seated.
The low hum of an electric generator ceased and the current was cut off.
“You fool!” cried the short, middle-aged, clean-shaven man in a dinner-jacket, and with a cigar stuck in the corner of his mouth.
“Will you never learn common sense, Freda, after all I’ve told you! It’s fortunate I came in at this moment! Do you want to be jugged? It seems so!”
Freda Crisp, in a gorgeous Paquin evening gown, turned deliberately in her chair and, coldly surveying the man who had just entered, said:
“Well, my dear Gordon, and what’s upset your digestion to-night? Things said over this wireless telephone—broadcasted over five hundred miles of space from your cosy rooms here—can be said without anybody being the wiser as to who uttered them. I look upon this wireless box of tricks as a priceless joke. You turn over a switch, and into thousands of ears you speak all over the kingdom, and across into Holland and France and even Scandinavia. The great Marconi is, you’ll admit, dear old thing, a wonderful nut!”
“Bah! You’re not serious, Freda! You laugh at perils. And a peril now faces us.”
“Ah! My dear Gordon, this is the first time I’ve ever heard such an admission from you—you, of all men! Peril? It’s in the dictionary, but not in your vocabulary—or mine, my dear boy. I’ve faced danger, and so have you—nasty troublous moments with detectives hanging around—but we’ve generally been able to wriggle out by the back door, or the window, or—”
“Or else bluff it out, Freda!” interrupted Gray. “Yes, you’re right! But to deliberately ask after the health of Roderick Homfray over the wireless telephone—well, it’s simply courting trouble.”