like belief, and with an
air of great secrecy insisting that they should give her refuge and
protection from Lyon's minions, who, she claimed--and perhaps had come
to believe--would yet in some way do her bodily harm; mysteriously
gliding about the Arcade and in the vicinity of his house, as if
expecting by some occult power to be able to divine what might be the
rich man's plans concerning her; and like the very evil thing that she
was, hiding in uncanny places, scared at her own voice or footsteps,
until the spell had left her.

About this time New York city dailies, and many of the newspapers of
large circulation throughout the interior of the State, were publishing
the following advertisement:

"Immense Success!--Miss Evalena Gray, the celebrated Spiritual
Physical Medium, lately from the Queen's Drawing-room, Hanover
Square, London, also Crystal Palace, Sydenham, and assisted by
Mlle. Willie Leveraux, from Paris, will give one of her
marvellous seances this evening at her elegant parlors, No. 19
West Twenty-first street, opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel, at
7:30 P.M."

New York city knew Miss Evalena Gray as a new aspirant to the honors and
emoluments derived from her ability to do mysterious things very
gracefully. She was as beautiful a woman as had ever come into New York
on this kind of business, and those who considered her a true medium
were in ecstasies over the magnificent contortions and superb evolutions
which her "great spiritual power" enabled her to execute with
bewildering rapidity, while disbelievers in the source of these
phenomena originating in celestial spheres could not resist her
fascinating powers; and the consequence was that her adroitness and
beauty had created a great sensation, so much so in fact that
respectable people had begun arguing about her, which answered just the
purpose sought.

New York also knew her as a woman so full of soul--that latter-day
substitute for brains and personal purity--as to have readily confused
and silenced great throngs in Europe wherever she had appeared; and she
had invariably challenged investigation, and that, too, with as much
audacity as success, which had in every instance been wonderfully marked
and complete.

Mrs. Winslow knew her as a little sprite she had met three years before
at Chardon, Ohio, a pleasant little village of about 3,000 inhabitants,
twelve miles south of Painesville, where Mrs. Winslow had been giving
se