vanguard of those who sought this new healing power--just a
few of them, two or three, like far, outflung skirmishers evidencing the
presence of the army corps to follow. With the reporters, as far as
Madison was concerned, it was simple enough; he had but to let them go
their way, to let them revel in the stories that were on every tongue,
to let them view with their own eyes _facts_, while he, modestly and
diffidently, full of quiet earnestness, effaced himself, never thrusting
himself forward, talking to them only when they pressed him--but the
handling of the sufferers who would flock to Needley in response to a
newspaper publicity and endorsement that had been beyond his wildest
dreams, was quite another matter. Madison viewed the first
arrivals--brought in from the station on cot beds to the Waldorf
Hotel--and retired to his room in the Congress Hotel to wrestle with the
niceties and minutiae of the problem.

"You see," said Madison to the tip of his cigar, as he tilted back his
chair and extended his legs full length with his heels comfortably up on
the table edge, "you see, I believe in faith all right--and that's no
josh. But the trouble with faith is that it's about the scarcest article
on earth--and I haven't got any more Floppers to lead the way." Madison
adroitly sent the cigar ash through the window with a tap of his
forefinger on the body of the cigar--he frowned, and for a long time sat
musingly silent. Then he spoke again; this time addressing the toes of
his boots: "With the house sold out for the season, the box-office doing
itself proud and the audience crazy over the first two acts, how about
Act Three--h'm?--how about Act Three? Kind of a delicate proposition,
the staging of Act Three--and it's time for the curtain to go up. I can
hear 'em stamping out front now. I can't pull off any more orgies like
last Monday afternoon, even if I wanted to--but everybody's got to have
a run for their money. Say, how about Act Three?"

Madison burned up quite a little tobacco in the interval before supper,
and quite a little more afterward before the setting for his perplexing
"Third Act" appeared to unfold itself satisfactorily before his
mind--indeed, it was close onto half past ten when, by a roundabout
way, he very cautiously and silently approached the Patriarch's cottage.

In the front of the cottage, the Shrine-room, as he christened it, and
the Patriarch's sleeping room were both dark. Madison passed aro