not in
constant communication with the spirit world, or that, if he wished, he
could not read the thoughts that moved slowly through her pretty head.

At the time of his marriage, the girl Vera, then a child of fourteen,
had written to Vance for help. She was ill, without money, and asked for
work. To him she was known as the last of a long line of people who had
always been professional mediums and spiritualists, and, out of
charity and from a sense of noblesse oblige to one of the elect of the
profession, Vance had made her his assistant. He had never regretted
having done so. The bread cast upon the waters was returned a
thousandfold. From the first, the girl brought in money. And his wife,
the older of the two, had welcomed her as a companion. After a fashion
the Vances had adopted her. In the advertisements she was described as
their "ward."

Vera now was twenty-one, tall, wonderfully graceful, and of the most
enchanting loveliness. Her education had been cosmopolitan. In the
largest cities of America she had met persons of every class--young
women, old women, mothers with married sons and daughters; women of
society as it is exploited in the Sunday supplements; school girls, shop
girls, factory girls--all had told her their troubles; and men of every
condition had come to scoff and had remained to express, more or less
offensively, their admiration. Some of the younger of these, after a
first visit, returned the day following, and each begged the beautiful
priestess of the occult to fly with him, to live with him, to marry
him. When this happened Vera would touch a button, and "Mannie" Day,
who admitted visitors, and later, in the hall, searched their hats and
umbrellas for initials, came on the run and threw the infatuated one out
upon a cold and unfeeling sidewalk.

So Vera had seen both the seamy side of life and, in the drawing rooms
where Vance and she exhibited their mind reading tricks, had been made
much of by great ladies and, for an hour as brief as Cinderella's,
had looked upon a world of kind and well-bred people. Since she was
fourteen, for seven years, this had been her life--a life as open to
the public as the life of an actress, as easy of access as that of
the stenographer in the hotel lobby. As a result, the girl had encased
herself in a defensive armor of hardness and distrust, a protection
which was rendered futile by the loveliness of her face, by the softness
of her voice, by the deep, br