“That’s better,” he said, “and the room’s warming up well. But there’s no sign of pulse yet. Go on stoking, will you, till the thermometer on the wall there registers a hundred degrees.” When next, on my journey from the coal-cellar, I looked, two more pieces of bone lay beside the one I had seen extracted, and presently referring to the thermometer, I saw that between the oil-stove and the roaring fire and the electric radiator, I had raised the room to the temperature he wanted. Soon, peering fixedly at the seat of his operation, he felt for her pulse again. “Not a sign of returning vitality,” he said, “and I’ve done all I can. There’s nothing more possible that can be devised to restore her.” As he spoke the zeal of the unrivalled surgeon relaxed, and with a sigh and a shrug he rose to his feet and mopped his face. Then suddenly the fire and eagerness blazed there again. “The gramophone!” he said. “The speech centre is close to where I’ve been working, and it is quite uninjured. Good heavens, what a wonderful opportunity. She served me well living, and she shall serve me dead. And I can stimulate the motor nerve-centre, too, with the second battery. We may see a new wonder to-night.” Some qualm of horror shook me. “No, don’t!” I said. “It’s terrible: she’s just dead. I shall go if you do.” “But I’ve got exactly all the conditions I have long been wanting,” said he. “And I simply can’t spare you. You must be witness: I must have a witness. Why, man, there’s not a surgeon or a physiologist in the kingdom who would not give an eye or an ear to be in your place now. She’s dead. I pledge you my honour on that, and it’s grand to be dead if you can help the living.” Once again, in a far fiercer struggle, horror and the intensest curiosity strove together in me. “Be quick, then,” said I. “Ha! That’s right,” exclaimed Horton. “Help me to lift her on to the table by the gramophone. The cushion too; I can get at the place more easily with her head a little raised.” He turned on the battery and with the movable light close beside him, brilliantly illuminating what he sought, he inserted the needle of the gramophone into the jagged aperture in her skull. For a few minutes, as he groped and explored there, there was silence, and then quite suddenly Mrs. Gabriel’s voice, clear and unmistakable and of the normal loudness of human speech, issued from the trumpet. “Yes, I always said that I’d be even with him,” came the articulated syllables. “He used to knock me about, he did, when he came home drunk, and often I was black and blue with bruises. But I’ll give him a redness for the black and blue.” The record grew blurred; instead of articulate words there came from it a gobbling noise. By degrees that cleared, and we were listening to some dreadful suppressed sort of laughter, hideous to hear. On and on it went. “I’ve got into some sort of rut,” said Horton. “She must have laughed a lot to herself.”