"You will probably not believe me," he said; "the thing sounds incredible; but then who would have believed once that there could be a telegraph, and still less a telephone? Who would have believed that the camera would ever be anything but a dream? I will tell you what this is. It is a machine in which you insert a portion, no matter how small, of a telephone wire, and by turning a handle you compel this piece of wire to give back every message that has ever passed over it." She held her heart. "This really exists?" she forced herself to ask. "Actually," said the engineer. "But when I left home the inventor was in a difficulty. All the messages were coming out all right, but backwards. Naturally the reproduction would be from the most recent to the less recent. By writing down the words and then reversing them the investigator could of course get at what he was wanting--I may say that the invention is for the New York police--but my friend is convinced that he can devise some mechanical system of reversing at the time which will make the messages read forward as they should. Just think of the excitement of the detective, listening through all the voices and ordinary conversations on the wire for the one voice and the one sentence that will give him his long-desired clue!--But are you ill?" "No, no," she said, although her face was a ghastly white, "no; it is nothing. The room is a little hot. Tell me some more about your inventive friend. Is he wealthy?" "Indeed, no," said the engineer. "That is his trouble. If he had more money, or if he had some rich backers who believed in him, he might do wonders." "I should like to help him," she said. "This kind of work interests me. Could you not cable him to come over and bring the thing with him? I would gladly finance him. I want some sporting outlet like that for my money." "Cable?" "Yes, cable. There are things that one does by impulse or not at all. The butler here will get you a form." It was a few weeks later that she went to the empty house with an employee of the telephone company, and they extracted a foot of the precious wire. That night she held it in her trembling fingers and placed it in the machine. Then she carefully locked the door and drew the heavy curtain over it and carried the machine to the farthest corner of the room. There, with a sigh of relief and tense and almost terrible anticipation, she sat down and placed her ear to the receiver and began to turn the handle.