ost so slight as only to emphasize the essential softness of
the day that followed: the crocuses were alight in the grass, and an
indescribable tint lay over all that had life, like the flush in the
face of an awakening child. But these days are too good to last, and
Lady Laura, who had looked at the forecast of a Sunday paper, had
determined to take her exercise immediately after church.

She had come out not long before from All Saints'; she had listened to
an excellent though unexciting sermon and some extremely beautiful
singing; and even now, saturated with that atmosphere and with the
soothing physical air in which she walked, her anxieties seemed less
acute. There were enough of her acquaintances, too, in groups here and
there--she had to bow and smile sufficiently often--to prevent these
anxieties from reasserting themselves too forcibly. And it may be
supposed that not a creature who observed her, in her exceedingly
graceful hat and mantle, with her fair head a little on one side, and
her gold-rimmed pince-nez delicately gleaming in the sunlight, had the
very faintest suspicion that she had any anxieties at all.

Yet she felt strangely unwilling even to go home.

The men were to set about clearing the drawing-room while she was at
church; and somehow the thought that it would be done when she got
home, that the temple would, so to speak, be cleared for sacrifice,
was a distasteful one.

She did not quite know when the change had begun; in fact, she was
scarcely yet aware that there was a change at all. Upon one point only
her attention fixed itself, and that was the increasing desire she
felt that Laurie Baxter should go no further in his researches under
her auspices.

Up to within a few weeks ago she had been all ardor. It had seemed to
her, as has been said, that the apparent results of spiritualism were
all to the good, that they were in no point contrary to the religion
she happened to believe--in fact, that they made real, as does an
actual tree in the foreground of a panorama, the rather misty sky and
hills of Christianity. She had even called them very "teaching."

It was about eighteen months since she had first taken this up under
the onslaught of Mrs. Stapleton's enthusiasm; but things had not been
as satisfactory as she wished, until Mr. Vincent had appeared. Then
indeed matters had moved forward; she had seen extraordinary things,
and the effect of them had been doubled by the medium's obviou