m.

"That is bad," said Miss Bowyer, seeing that Tommy would not look. "If I
could get him to strain the eyes upward for five minutes, while I gazed
at him and concentrated my mind on the act of gazing, I should be able
to produce what is known in psychopathic science as the conscious
impressible state--something resembling hypnotism, but stopping short of
the unconscious state. I could make him forget his disease by willing
forgetfulness. I must try another plan."

Miss Bowyer now sat and gazed on the child, who was half-slumbering. For
five minutes she sat there like a cat ready to jump at the first
movement of a moribund mouse. Apparently she was engaged in
concentrating her mind on the act of gazing.

"Now," she said to Mrs. Martin in a whisper--for explication was a
necessity of Miss Bowyer's nature, or perhaps essential to the potency
of her measures--"now I will gently place the right hand on the fore
brain and the left over the cerebellum, willing the vital force of the
cerebrum to retreat backward to the cerebellum. This is the condition of
the brain in the somnambulic state and in ordinary sleep. The right
hand, you must know, acts from without inward, while the left acts from
within outward." She suited the action to the words; but Tommy did not
take kindly to the action of her right hand from without inward, or else
he was annoyed by the action of the left hand from within outward.
Evidently Miss Bowyer's positive and negative poles failed to harmonize
with his. He put up his hands to push away her positive and negative
poles; but finding that impossible, he kicked and cried in a way which
showed him to be utterly out of harmony with the odylic emanations of
the terrestrial magnet.

With these and other mummeries Miss Bowyer proceeded during all the long
hour and a quarter that intervened between Phillida's departure and the
arrival of the reinforcement. Miss Bowyer was wondering meanwhile what
could have been the nature of Phillida's conference outside the door
with Mrs. Martin, and whether Mrs. Martin were sufficiently convinced of
her skill by this time for her to venture to leave the place presently
to meet certain office patients whom she expected. But she concluded to
run no risks of defeat; she had left word at her office that she had
been called to see a patient dangerously ill, and such a report would do
her reputation no harm.

Mrs. Martin was driven to the very verge of distraction by the sen