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Kennedy fingered the now set impressions, then resumed: “Before I answer that question, what else does the spectroscope show? I found some spots near the coffin, which has been broken open by a heavy object. It had slipped and had injured the body of Montague Phelps. From the injury some drops had oozed. My spectroscope tells me that that, too, is blood. The blood and other muscular and nervous fluids of the body had remained in an aqueous condition instead of becoming pectous. That is a remarkable circumstance.”

It flashed over me what Kennedy had been driving at in his inquiry regarding embalming. If the poisons of the embalming fluid had not been injected, he had now clear proof regarding anything his spectroscope discovered.

“I had expected to find a poison, perhaps an alkaloid,” he continued slowly, as he outlined his discoveries by the use of one of the most fascinating branches of modern science, spectroscopy. “In cases of poisoning by these substances, the spectroscope often has obvious advantages over chemical methods, for minute amounts will produce a well-defined spectrum. The spectroscope ‘spots’ the substance, to use a police idiom, the moment the case is turned over to it. There was no poison there.” He had raised his voice to emphasise the startling revelation. “Instead, I found an extraordinary amount of the substance and products of glycogen. The liver, where this substance is stored, is literally surcharged in the body of Phelps.”

He had started his moving-picture machine.

“Here I have one of the latest developments in the moving-picture art,” he resumed, “an X-ray moving picture, a feat which was until recently visionary, a science now in its infancy, bearing the formidable names of biorontgenography, or kinematoradiography.”

Kennedy was holding his little audience breathless as he proceeded. I fancied I could see Anginette Phelps give a little shudder at the prospect of looking into the very interior of a human body. But she was pale with the fascination of it. Neither Forden nor the nurse looked to the right or to the left. Dana Phelps was open-eyed with wonder.

“In one X-ray photograph, or even in several,” continued Kennedy, “it is difficult to discover slight motions. Not so in a moving picture. For instance, here I have a picture which will show you a living body in all its moving details.”

On the screen before us was projected a huge shadowgraph of a chest and abdomen. We could see the vertebrae of the spinal column, the ribs, and the various organs.

“It is difficult to get a series of photographs directly from a fluorescent screen,” Kennedy went on. “I overcome the difficulty by having lenses of sufficient rapidity to photograph even faint images on that screen. It is better than the so-called serial method, by which a number of separate X-ray pictures are taken and then pieced together and rephotographed to make the film. I can focus the X-rays first on the screen by means of a special quartz objective which I have devised. Then I take the pictures.

“Here, you see, are the lungs in slow or rapid respiration. There is the rhythmically beating heart, distinctly pulsating in perfect outline. There is the liver, moving up and down with the diaphragm, the intestines, and the stomach. You can see the bones moving with the limbs, as well as the inner visceral life. All that is hidden to the eye by the flesh is now made visible in striking manner.”

Never have I seen an audience at the “movies” so thrilled as we were now, as Kennedy swayed our interest at his will. I had been dividing my attention between Kennedy and the extraordinary beauty of the famous Russian dancer. I forgot Anginette Phelps entirely.

Kennedy placed another film in the holder.

“You are now looking into the body of Montague Phelps,” he announced suddenly.

We leaned forward eagerly. Mrs. Phelps gave a half-suppressed gasp. What was the secret hidden in it?

There was the stomach, a curved sack something like a bagpipe or a badly made boot, with a tiny canal at the toe connecting it with the small intestine. There were the heart and lungs.