ght this strange and terrible
battle with the powers of the air for the honor of his wife and his own.

There was little enough need of any preliminary effort on Lansing's
part to fix his thoughts upon Mary. It was only requisite that to the
intensity of the mental vision, with which he had before imagined her,
should be added the activity of the will, turning the former mood of
despair into one of resistance. He knew in what room of their house the
wedding party must now be gathered, and was able to represent to
himself the scene there as vividly as if he had been present. He saw
the relatives assembled; he saw Mr. Davenport, the minister, and, facing
him, the bridal couple, in the only spot where they could well stand,
before the fireplace. But from all the others, from the guests, from the
minister, from the bridegroom, he turned his thoughts, to fix them on
the bride alone. He saw her as if through the small end of an immensely
long telescope, distinctly, but at an immeasurable distance. On this
face his mental gaze was riveted, as by conclusive efforts his will
strove to reach and move hers against the thing that she was doing.
Although his former experiments in mental phenomena had in a measure
familiarized him with the mode of addressing his powers to such an
undertaking as this, yet the present effort was on a scale so much
vaster that his will for a time seemed appalled, and refused to go out
from him, as a bird put forth from a ship at sea returns again and again
before daring to essay the distant flight to land. He felt that he was
gaining nothing. He was as one who beats the air. It was all he could do
to struggle against the influences that tended to deflect and dissipate
his thoughts. Again and again a conviction of the uselessness of the
attempt, of the madness of imagining that a mere man could send a wish,
like a voice, across a continent, laid its paralyzing touch upon his
will, and nothing but a sense of the black horror which failure meant
enabled him to throw it off. If he but once admitted the idea of
failing, all was lost. He must believe that he could do this thing,
or he surely could not. To question it was to surrender his wife;
to despair was to abandon her to her fate. So, as a wrestler strains
against a mighty antagonist, his will strained and tugged in supreme
stress against the impalpable obstruction of space, and, fighting
despair with despair, doggedly held to its purpose, and sought to k