"Lee! Please! I can't understand you. Please don't touch me! Your eyes burn me--please go away. What in the world has come over you?" Bentley listened for the reply of the creature he knew was in the other room with Ellen Estabrook. But the answer was a gurgling gibberish that made no sense at all! His own body, directed by the brain of an ape, could not emit speech that Ellen could understand, because the ape could not speak. The ape's vocal cords, which now were Bentley's, were incapable of speech. How, if Barter continued to keep Ellen in ignorance of what had happened, would she ever know the horrible truth--and realize the danger that threatened her? "Don't worry for the moment, Bentley," said Barter with a smile. "I am not yet ready for your other self to go to undue lengths--though I dislike intensely to leave the marks of my whip on that handsome body of yours!" Barter slipped from the room. Bentley listened, amazed at the clarity with which he heard every vagrant little sound--until he remembered again that his hearing was that of a jungle beast--until he knew that Barter had entered that other room. Then came the crackling reports of the whip, wielded mightily by the hands of Barter. A scream that was half human, half animal, was the result of the lashing. Bentley cringed as he imagined the bite of that lash which he himself had experienced but a few moments before. "Professor Barter! Professor Barter!" distinctly came the voice of Ellen Estabrook. "Don't! Don't! He didn't mean anything, I am sure. He is sick, something dreadful has happened to him. But he wouldn't really hurt me. He couldn't--not really. Stop, please! Don't strike him again!" But the sound of the lash continued. "Stop, I tell you!" Ellen's voice rose to a cry of agonized entreaty. "Don't strike him again. See, you've ripped his flesh until he is covered with blood! Strike me if you must strike someone--for with all my heart and soul I love him!" CHAPTER V _Fumbling Hands_ Now Bentley was beginning to realize to the full the horrible thing that had befallen himself and Ellen Estabrook. He knew something else, too. It had come to him when he had heard Ellen's words next door--telling Barter that she loved the creature Barter was beating, which she thought was Lee Bentley. That creature was Lee Bentley; but only the earthly casement of Lee Bentley. The ruling power of Bentley's body, the driving force which actuated his body, was the brain of an ape. As for Bentley himself, that part of him of which he thought when he thought of "I," to all intents and purposes, to all outer seeming, had become an ape. His body was an ape's body, his legs were an ape's, everything about him was simian save one thing--the "ego," that something by which man knows that he is himself, with an individual identity. That was buried behind the almost non-existent brow of an ape.