I confess it seems very like it to me, although I have always heard
him well spoken of. Stay!" he cried, with a start, "you tell me the
doctor has already left the city! oh! then he must be a party to the foul
wrong of which I am the victim. Let me out--I tell you I _will_ not
submit to such inhuman treatment," and he turned fiercely upon the
attendant, as if he meditated attacking and overpowering him, with the
hope of forcing his way from the place.

But the attendant quietly retreated before him, looking him calmly in the
eye, and, as Ray pressed closely upon him, he made a few passes before
his face with his hands.

Instantly the young man began to experience that same sense of weariness
and drowsiness that had over-powered him when those masterful eyes had
fastened themselves upon him through the hole in the wall.

"Don't! don't!" he cried, throwing out his arms as if to ward off the
influence, while he tried to resist it with all his will-power.

But his arm fell powerless by his side and he sank into a chair near
which he was standing, and the attendant turned and left the room, a
smile of peculiar satisfaction on his face.

"That was very well done, I think, for a pupil of the great Doctor
Wesselhoff," he muttered, as he shot the bolt into the socket and turned
to go about other duties. "It will not be long before I shall be able to
exert the power as skillfully as he does."

Ray sat as one half dazed for a few moments after the departure of Mr.
Huff, and tried to combat with all the strength of his will the strange
desire to sleep.

Then suddenly his glance became riveted upon something that was clinging
to the leg of his trousers.

He stooped to pick it off, examining it closely, and uttered an
exclamation of surprise upon finding that it was a small piece of ladies'
cloth of a delicate mauve color.

"Ha!" he cried, excitedly; "it is as precious as gold dust, and may prove
to be very useful to me. How fortunate I am to have found it!"

It was a small piece of woolen goods that had been torn from Mrs.
Vanderbeck's dress, and Ray, after a moment, put it carefully away in his
pocket-book, in the hope of some time finding the rent that it would fit.

It was true that Doctor Wesselhoff had been suddenly called away to his
sick wife.

No other summons would have had the power to draw him away from New York
at that time, for he experienced great anxiety and interest regarding the
new and peculiar case t