from beneath her feet and from the walls; her eyes were shut, her
chin lifted, and on her face, white and tense, lay the expression of a
sorrowful dreamer. Her mouth, drooping at the corners, was pitiful to
see. All her vivid youth, her flaming rebellion, had been frozen into
soulless calm by the implacable powers which reigned above and beneath
her in the dark.

In horror and fierce, impotent rage, Serviss watched her descend. It
was plain that she was again in the grasp of some soul stronger than
herself; and he believed this obsession, close akin to madness, to be
due to a living, overmastering magician--to Clarke, whose voice broke
the silence. "There is your answer!" he called, and his voice rang
out, with triumphant glee. "Her 'guides' have brought her to show you
the folly of human interference. She is only an instrument like
myself--clay to the hands of the invisible potters."

Once again a flaming desire to seize the girl with protecting hands
filled Serviss's young and chivalric heart; but a sense of his
essential helplessness, a knowledge of his utter lack of authority,
stayed his arm, while his blaze of resolution went out like a flame in
the wind. Sick with horror, he stood till Mrs. Lambert took Viola in
her arms, then, in a voice that shook with passion, he said: "Madam,
your faith in your spirits passes my understanding. Only devils from
hell would demand such torture from a blithe young girl."

And so saying, with shame of his impotence, and with a full
realization of Viola's mental bondage to Anthony Clarke, he turned
away. "I now understand Britt's words--only the authority of the
husband can save her from her all-surrounding foes," and at the moment
his fist doubled with desire to claim and exercise that power.

X

MORTON SENDS A TELEGRAM

The harsh reality of the outside world was like the hard-driven, acrid
spray of the ocean in a wintry storm, it stung yet calmed with its
grateful, stern menace. A thin drizzle of rain was beginning to fall,
and the avenues were filled with the furious clamor of belated
traffic. The clangor of the overhead trains--almost incessant at this
hour--benumbed the ear, and every side-street rang with the hideous
clatter of drays and express-carts, each driver, each motor-man,
laboring in a kind of sullen frenzy to reach his barn before six
o'clock, while truculent pedestrians, tired, eager, and exacting, trod
upon one another's heels in their homeward hast