o longer seemed small or
insignificant. Twenty years were gone from her age. Her eyes were
shining, a tinge of color had come into her sallow cheeks, her whole
figure had expanded. So I have seen a dull-eyed, listless lad change
in an instant into briskness and life when given a task of which he
felt himself master. She looked down at Agatha with an expression
which I resented from the bottom of my soul--the expression with which
a Roman empress might have looked at her kneeling slave. Then with a
quick, commanding gesture she tossed up her arms and swept them slowly
down in front of her.

I was watching Agatha narrowly. During three passes she seemed to be
simply amused. At the fourth I observed a slight glazing of her eyes,
accompanied by some dilation of her pupils. At the sixth there was a
momentary rigor. At the seventh her lids began to droop. At the tenth
her eyes were closed, and her breathing was slower and fuller than
usual. I tried as I watched to preserve my scientific calm, but a
foolish, causeless agitation convulsed me. I trust that I hid it, but
I felt as a child feels in the dark. I could not have believed that I
was still open to such weakness.

"She is in the trance," said Miss Penclosa.

"She is sleeping!" I cried.

"Wake her, then!"

I pulled her by the arm and shouted in her ear. She might have been
dead for all the impression that I could make. Her body was there on
the velvet chair. Her organs were acting--her heart, her lungs. But
her soul! It had slipped from beyond our ken. Whither had it gone?
What power had dispossessed it? I was puzzled and disconcerted.

"So much for the mesmeric sleep," said Miss Penclosa. "As regards
suggestion, whatever I may suggest Miss Marden will infallibly do,
whether it be now or after she has awakened from her trance. Do you
demand proof of it?"

"Certainly," said I.

"You shall have it." I saw a smile pass over her face, as though an
amusing thought had struck her. She stooped and whispered earnestly
into her subject's ear. Agatha, who had been so deaf to me, nodded her
head as she listened.

"Awake!" cried Miss Penclosa, with a sharp tap of her crutch upon the
floor. The eyes opened, the glazing cleared slowly away, and the soul
looked out once more after its strange eclipse.

We went away early. Agatha was none the worse for her strange
excursion, but I was nervous and unstrung, unable to listen to or
answer the stream