Will anything as wonderful happen to-night?"

"I cannot tell--the conditions are severe, but I think we will have
something. Viola?" he called, softly.

"Yes," she answered, faintly.

"Would you like us to sing?"

"No--I'd rather you'd all talk. Perhaps they will let me take part in
the demonstration to-night. They promised to do so, you remember."

Weissman recounted some of the experiences Zoellner had enjoyed in
Germany shortly after the Fox sisters became so celebrated in America.
"Crookes and Wallace and several others went into the whole question
at that time--the world rang with the controversy. But the clamor
passed, the phenomena passed. It is like an epidemic, it comes and it
goes, and in the end is humanity the wiser? No."

"Yes, it is," broke in Clarke. "We are just that much more certain of
the indestructible life of the soul--every wave of this spirit-sea
leaves a deposit of fact on the beach of time, makes death that much
less dreadful. We make gains each decade. Sir William Crookes, Sir
Oliver Lodge, Alfred Russel Wallace, Lombroso have all been convinced
of the reality of these phenomena. Surely such men must influence the
thought of their time. Experimental psychology is on the right road--"

Morton was suffering with the girl, whose hand was beginning to
tremble beneath his palm. She no longer replied to his questions, but
that she was still awake he knew, for he could hear her sighing
deeply, so deeply that the sound troubled him almost as if she were
weeping. His impulse was to rise and turn on the light and give over
this trial, which could only end in humiliating her. "Her temerity is
a part of her malady," he argued. "It has arisen through years of
misconceived petting and nursing on the part of her mother. Up to this
moment her performances have always been in the presence of friends
and relatives, or for the consolation of those eager to believe, and
therefore easily deluded. Every sitter has conspired to practically
force her into an elaborate series of deceptions, each deceit being
built upon and made necessary by the other. It is pitiful, but she now
believes in herself--that is pathetically certain. Otherwise she would
not have yielded herself so completely into the hands of an inexorable
investigator like Weissmann. She must take the consequences," he
ended, with grim closing of the lips. "We must be cruel in order to be
kind. This night may be her salvation."

Weissmann was repl