I sent the telegram."

"I am very glad you did, although I had no fear. I knew my father
would find the right way when the time came. Let me tell you, sir,"
she replied, expanding in the warmth of his interest. "Before these
revelations came to me I had no real faith in God or heaven. The world
beyond the grave was dark and cold. It seemed to me as if my little
boy and my husband were in the cruel, wet ground. I couldn't feel that
they had gone to Christ. But now the tomb is but a portal to the
light. The spirit-plane is as real as the earth-plane, and filled with
joyous souls. I can hear them sing sometimes when I hold Viola's hand,
and the sound is very beautiful and very comforting."

"I can understand that," he answered, but quietly, critically, still
studying her face. "It has a warmer charm than any other religion I
know."

She went on, eagerly: "I wish you could come to believe. Your sister
said your mother and your uncle spoke last night. Why can't you accept
the faith?"

The young philosopher gained, as she spoke, a new conception of her
character, and chilled with a growing sense of the difficult and
ungracious task which lay before him. He began to perceive that her
awe of him had kept her silent, thus concealing from him the spirit of
the evangelist which he now saw she possessed. She counted more
largely in Viola's development than he had hitherto granted. Her
faith was solidly based on years of experience and was not to be
easily moved. As she went on he perceived that her daughter's
mediumship was much more than a theory in her thought; it was a fact,
and a daily, almost an hourly, necessity. He lost his last suspicion
of her, and caught a glimpse of the larger aspect of her relationship
to his future. She was deceived, of course, but she was honest in
every fibre. He could not accuse her of the slightest deceit or
falsification.

In her lame way she tried to argue the question, quoting the
platitudes of the "inspirational speakers," as well as the pompous
phrases of her spirit-father, while he listened courteously.

When she paused, he said, gravely: "My dear Mrs. Lambert, I can't
leave you in any doubt of my position. I cannot for a single instant
accept what happened last night as the manifestation of the
disembodied. I cannot think that the phenomena exist. I must rather
think they were performed by Clarke, or my sister, or Weissmann, in
joke." She looked at him with an expression of horror,