under your influence--you might easily
make me believe that you were not yourself, but another woman--for the
rest of my life."

They stood looking at each other in silence during several seconds. Then
Unorna seemed to understand what he meant.

"Do you really believe that is possible?" she asked earnestly.

"I know it. I know of a case in which it succeeded very well."

"Perhaps," she said, thoughtfully. "Let us go and look at him."

She moved in the direction of the aged sleeper's room and they both left
the hall together.

CHAPTER XIII

Unorna was superstitious, as Keyork Arabian had once told her. She
did not thoroughly understand herself and she had very little real
comprehension of the method by which she produced such remarkable
results. She was gifted with a sensitive and active imagination, which
supplied her with semi-mystic formulae of thought and speech in place
of reasoned explanations, and she undoubtedly attributed much of her own
power to supernatural influences. In this respect, at least, she was
no farther advanced than the witches of older days, and if her inmost
convictions took a shape which would have seemed incomprehensible to
those predecessors of hers, this was to be attributed in part to the
innate superiority of her nature, and partly, also, to the high degree
of cultivation in which her mental faculties had reached development.

Keyork Arabian might spend hours in giving her learned explanations of
what she did, but he never convinced her. Possibly he was not convinced
himself, and he still hesitated, perhaps, between the two great theories
advanced to explain the phenomena of hypnotism. He had told her that he
considered her influence to be purely a moral one, exerted by means of
language and supported by her extraordinary concentrated will. But
it did not follow that he believed what he told her, and it was not
improbable that he might have his own doubts on the subject--doubts
which Unorna was not slow to suspect, and which destroyed for her the
whole force of his reasoning. She fell back upon a sort of grossly
unreasonable mysticism, combined with a blind belief in those hidden
natural forces and secret virtues of privileged objects, which formed
the nucleus of mediaeval scientific research. The field is a fertile
one for the imagination and possesses a strange attraction for certain
minds. There are men alive in our own time to whom the transmutation of
metals does not seem