the Faith Healer. Some woman's instinct drove straight to the centre
of a disconcerting possibility, and in consternation she told her husband;
and Jansen husbands had a freemasonry of gossip. An hour, and all Jansen
knew, or thought they knew; and the "saved" rejoiced; and the rest of the
population, represented by Nicolle Terasse at one end and Flood Rawley at
the other, flew to arms. No vigilance committee was ever more determined
and secret and organized than the unconverted civic patriots who were
determined to restore Jansen to its old-time condition. They pointed out
cold-bloodedly that the Faith Healer had failed three times where he had
succeeded once; and that, admitting the successes, there was no proof that
his religion was their cause. There were such things as hypnotism and
magnetism and will-power, and abnormal mental stimulus on the part of the
healed--to say nothing of the Healing Springs.

Carefully laying their plans, they quietly spread the rumor that Ingles
had promised to restore to health old Mary Jewell, who had been bedridden
ten years, and had sent word and prayed to have him lay his hands upon
her--Catholic though she was. The Faith Healer, face to face with this
supreme and definite test, would have retreated from it but for Laura
Sloly. She expected him to do it, believed that he could, said that he
would, herself arranged the day and the hour, and sang so much exaltation
into him that at last a spurious power seemed to possess him. He felt that
there had entered into him something that could be depended on, not the
mere flow of natural magnetism fed by an out-door life and a temperament
of great emotional force and chance and suggestion--and other things. If,
at first, he had influenced Laura, some ill-controlled, latent idealism in
him, working on a latent poetry and spirituality in her, somehow bringing
her into nearer touch with her lost Playmates than she had been in the
long years that had passed; she, in turn, had made his unrationalized
brain reel; had caught him up into a higher air, on no wings of his own;
had added another lover to her company of lovers--and the first impostor
she had ever had. She who had known only honest men as friends, in one
blind moment lost her perspicuous sense; her instinct seemed asleep. She
believed in the man and in his healing. Was there anything more than
that?

The day of the great test came, hot, brilliant, vivid. The air was of a
delicate sharpne