st the
thing she had done yesterday seemed all right to-day and you were ready
for some new invention of hers to-morrow.

Mainly she treated diseases by the laying on of hands, and the best that
could be said of her as to that was she preyed on the rich and would
take no patients she thought were short of at least fifty pounds to
spend for her mumbo-jumbo and gimcracks. She would talk in a very smooth
voice to those she got in her web--about the flow of vital energy and
the power of positive and negative currents over the valves of the heart
and circulation of the blood. She would roll up her eyes and complain of
how the treatments, which consisted of laying her fingers on a person's
temples and wrists, exhausted her, and at first I thought she really
meant it, and when her good, old motherly face was turned away, many was
the time I laughed. And finally, when I began to see that most of her
patients improved and some were cured, I stopped laughing, for there was
the evidence before my eyes and no denying it.

Whether or no she had power to heal, I would have stayed with her. Her
influence was like slow rot and the germ of it was deep-seated before
you could even see that it was time to resist it. I was acting as her
maid in private at first, and before other people, wherever we
went,--Paris, Vienna, Berlin, Monte Carlo, and lots of places I have
forgotten,--I was supposed to be her daughter who had joined her from
New York. And it was all one to me, for I was drawing a fine pay and
living very rich and I could see that the name and game of Mrs.
Welstoke spelled prosperity.

All this, of course, was before I even saw the Judge, but I was getting
my training, and learning how easy money could be made to come through a
little fol-de-rol here and a bit of blackmail there, and introducing one
class of society to another in the next place. It was easy to salve my
conscience, because the old adventuress was curing many a poor sleepless
or rheumatic creature who could spend money like dirt to get the result,
and besides, she took an interest in me enough to make me wonder why,
and she was always keeping her eyes open like a pilot to see that I
didn't meet any man who might be after me. To tell the truth, she talked
so much of the villainy of males and the horrors of marriage that
finally I believed what she said and turned my young face away from all
men, just as if good, timid, and bad were run out of the same mould.

We