, if you choose to consider it. If not,
you may consult other physicians."

"Let me hear your plan first," she answered, affably, in her secret joy.

"Let me take him to a private sanitarium in New York, well known to me
as the best place in the United States for a person in his condition. It
is a high-priced place, but you can afford it for the sake of the relief
of mind you would experience in removing this threatening danger from
Ellsworth, and in knowing that his hopelessly incurable insanity had the
kindest treatment."

Those two words caught her instant attention.

"You honestly believe him hopelessly insane?" she cried.

"Yes," he replied; saying, inwardly: "God forgive me for lying, but it
is in a righteous cause!"

In fact, he was quaking with fear lest she should suspect the motive
lying at the bottom of his anxiety to take his patient to New York.

If she had been a well-read woman, he would have been afraid to risk
such a plot; but he knew that she scarcely ever scanned the columns of a
newspaper.

Otherwise she would have been cognizant of the new scientific discovery,
one of the greatest of the nineteenth century triumphs, and most
important to the medical cult--the discovery of the wonderful X-ray of
light by the famous German savant, Professor Roentgen.

She would have known that by the operation of this X-ray the formerly
dense human body could be made transparent enough to be seen through,
revealing not only the skeleton with all its delicate mechanism, but the
presence of every foreign element, so that already bullets had been
located and removed from the bodies of patients who had suffered
tortures from them for years. These wonderful facts filled the columns
of newspapers and the pages of magazines. The whole world was wild with
enthusiasm. It was the greatest and most beneficial discovery of the
nineteenth century, they said, and Professor Roentgen's thoughtful brow
was laureled with a fame that made him greater than a king.

Mrs. Ellsworth had never read a line about the X-ray. If you had asked
her she would not have understood what you meant.

But every fiber of the intelligent old doctor's body vibrated with joy
of the new discovery, and the hope that through its means his patient
might be restored to health.

The dream that he dreamed night and day was to carry Lovelace Ellsworth
to New York and have the bullet in his head located by means of the
wonderful X-ray.

"Once located