e."

Kate, awed and helpless, permitted him to lead her from the room, but
when fairly outside she turned upon him fiercely: "Don't touch me. I
despise you. You are all crazy, a set of fanatics, and you'd sacrifice
that poor girl without a pang. But you sha'n't do it, I tell you--you
sha'n't do it!"

And with that defiant phrase she swept past him down to the street,
forgetting Dr. Britt in her frenzy of indignation and defeat.

VI

SERVISS LISTENS SHREWDLY

Meanwhile Morton, with an armful of the publications of "The Society
for Psychical Research" before him, was busied with the arguments of
the spiritists and their bearings on Viola Lambert's case.

The thing claimed--that the dead spoke through her--he could not for a
moment entertain. Such a claim was opposed to all sound thinking, to
every law known to science--was, in short, preposterous.

He had acquired all the prejudices against such a faith from Emerson's
famous phrase, "rat-hole philosophy," down to the latest sneer in the
editorial columns of _The Pillar_, to the latest "expose" in _The
Blast_. Upon the most charitable construction, those who believed in
rappings, planchettes, materialized forms, ghosts, messages on slates,
and all the rest of the amazing catalogue, were either half-baked
thinkers, intellectual perverts, or soft-pated sentimentalists, whose
judgment was momentarily clouded by the passing of a grief.

"And yet," said one author, "go a little deeper and you will find in
the very absurdities of these phenomena a possible argument for their
truth. A manufactured system would be careful to avoid putting
forward as evidence a thing so childish and so ludicrous as a spirit
tipping a table, writing in a bottle, or speaking through a tin horn.
Who but a childlike and trusting soul would expect to convince a man
of science of the immortality of the soul by causing a message from
his grandfather to appear in red letters on his arm? The hit-or-miss
character of all these phenomena, the very silliness and stupidity
which you find in the appeal, may be taken as evidence of the
sincerity of the psychic."

To this Morton took exception. "I don't see that. There has never been
a religion too gross, too fallacious, to fail of followers. Remember
the sacred bull of Egypt and the snake-dance of the Hopi. The whole
theory, as Spencer says, is a survival of a more primitive life and
religion."

Finding himself alone with Weissmann during the