"Can any voice be so repeated?" she asked, seriously, when this record was completed. "Anyone ye please--any ye please!" said the delighted promoter, visions of uncounted wealth dancing in his head. "Now, here's a few words was spoken on a cylinder jest two or three weeks ago by Miss Wise," he continued, hunting through his stock of records. "Ah, here it is! It's all 'bout Mister Bacon--I daresay you know him." The Queen looked a little stern at this. "Tells all 'bout him, I believe. I ferget jest what it said, but we can soon see." The cylinder was that before which Phoebe had read an extract from the volume on Bacon's supposed parentage and his writings while she was at the North Pole. Little did Droop conceive what a train he was unconsciously lighting as he adjusted the cylinder in place. As he said, he had forgotten the exact purport of the extract in question, but, even had he recollected it, he would probably have so little understood its terrific import that his course would have been the same. Ignorant of his danger, he pushed the starting-button and looked pleasantly at the Queen, whose dislike of anything having to do with Francis Bacon had already brought a frown to her face. All too exactly the fateful mechanism ground out the very words and voice of Phoebe: "It is thus made clear from the indubitable evidence of the plays themselves, that Francis Bacon wrote the immortal works falsely ascribed to William Shakespeare, and that the gigantic genius of this man was the result of the possession of royal blood. In this unacknowledged son of Elizabeth Tudor, Queen of England, was made manifest to all countries and for all centuries the glorious powers inherent in the regal blood of England." As the fearful meaning of these words was developed by the machine, amazement gave place to consternation in those present and consternation to abject terror. Each fear-palsied courtier looked with pale face to right and left as though to seek escape. The fat knight, hitherto all complacency, listening to this brazen traducer of the Queen's virgin honor, seemed to shrink within himself, and his very clothing hung loose upon him. Droop and Rebecca, ignorant of the true bearing of the spoken words, gazed in amazement from one to another until, glancing at the Queen, their eyes remained fixed and fascinated. The unthinkable insult implied in the words repeated was trebled in force by being spoken thus publicly and in calm accents to her very face. She--the daughter of Henry the Eighth; she--Elizabeth of England--the Virgin Queen--to be thus coolly proclaimed the mother of this upstart barrister! As a cyclone approaches, silent and terrific, visible only in the swift swirling changes of a livid and blackened sky, so the fatal passion in that imperial bosom was known at first only in the gleaming of her black eyes beneath contorted brows and the spasmodic changes that swept over the pale red-painted face.