to sob, but did not utter a word.

"Let her go, doctor," said Mr. Waring, coming up. "We paid to see a
farce, and it was really a very nice bit of acting. This poor girl was
hired, no doubt: she is only earning her living."

"What has she done?" cried Dehr. "Spiritualism in Philadelphia never has
attracted the class of investigators that are here to-day, and she--"
shaking her viciously--"she's an impostor!"

"Damnation! she's a woman!" wrenching his hand from her. She gave Waring
a keen furtive glance, and drew quickly aside. While some of the seekers
after truth demanded their five dollars back with New England obstinacy,
and Combe chattered and screeched at them, she stood in the middle of
the room, immovable, her sombre sallow face set, her tawdry
stage-properties about her--the crown of false black hair, the sweeping
drapery, the smoking dish with fumes of ghastly vapor.

Mr. Waring went up to a short, broadly-built man in gray who had been
seated in the background during the seance. "I did not know that you
were in town or here, Mr. Neckart," he said with a certain marked
respect. "That is not an unpicturesque figure, I think. She would serve
as a study of Night, now--a stormy, muggy town-night, full of ooze and
slime." Mr. Waring's manner and rhetoric were uneasy and deferential.
Mr. Neckart was a power in a region quite outside of the little
fastidious gossiping club of men and women whom he was wont to call the
World.

"Your Night, apparently, has little relish for the morning," he said.

The woman's threatening eyes, in fact, were fixed on the tall fair girl,
the captain's daughter, who stood in the window, busied with buttoning
her father's overcoat and pinning his empty sleeve to his breast. She
was looking up at him, and talking: the wind stirred her loose pale-gold
hair; behind her branches of white roses from a vine outside thrust
themselves in at the window: the birds chirped in the rustling maples
beyond.

"What a wonderful effect of light and color!" said Waring, who had
lounged through studios and galleries enough to enable him to parcel out
the world into so many bits of palette and brush-work. "Observe the
atmosphere of sunshine and youth. Cabanel might paint the girl's face
for the Dawn. Eyes of that profound blue appear to hold the light
latent."

"There seems to be unusual candor in them," said Mr. Neckart, glancing
carelessly at Jane again, and drawing on his gloves. "A lack of
shrewdn