visitor.

"Let the sleep gain on him for a minute or two more," she said. "Then
take one of his hands, and put to him what questions you please."

"Does he hear us now, madam?"

"You might fire off a pistol, sir, close to his ear, and he would not
hear it. The vibration might disturb him; that is all. Until you or I
touch him, and so establish the nervous sympathy, he is as lost to all
sense of our presence here, as if he were dead."

"Are you speaking of the thing called Animal Magnetism, madam?"

"Yes, sir."

"And you believe in it, of course?"

"My son's belief, sir, is my belief in this thing as in other things.
I have heard what he has been saying to you. It is for me that he
sacrifices himself by holding these exhibitions; it is in my poor
interests that his hardly-earned money is made. I am in infirm health;
and, remonstrate as I may, my son persists in providing for me, not
the bare comforts only, but even the luxuries of life. Whatever I may
suffer, I have my compensation; I can still thank God for giving me
the greatest happiness that a woman can enjoy, the possession of a good
son."

She smiled fondly as she looked at the sleeping man. "Draw your chair
nearer to him," she resumed, "and take his hand. You may speak freely
in making your inquiries. Nothing that happens in this room goes out of
it."

With those words she returned to her place, in the corner behind her
son's chair.

The visitor took Doctor Lagarde's hand. As they touched each other,
he was conscious of a faintly-titillating sensation in his own hand--a
sensation which oddly reminded him of bygone experiments with an
electrical machine, in the days when he was a boy at school!

"I wish to question you about my future life," he began. "How ought I to
begin?"

The Doctor spoke his first words in the monotonous tones of a man
talking in his sleep.

"Own your true motive before you begin," he said. "Your interest in your
future life is centered in a woman. You wish to know if her heart will
be yours in the time that is to come--and there your interest in your
future life ends."

This startling proof of the sleeper's capacity to look, by sympathy,
into his mind, and to see there his most secret thoughts, instead of
convincing the stranger, excited his suspicions. "You have means of
getting information," he said, "that I don't understand."

The Doctor smiled, as if the idea amused him.

Madame Lagarde rose from her seat and interp