ard allayed their worst fears. She still
smiled, and seemed as cheerful as before, they heard, and she neither
spoke nor prayed in public, but she led the singing always. Now the
anxious and the sceptical and the reactionary ventured out to see and
hear; and seeing and hearing gave them a satisfaction they hardly dared
express. She was more handsome than ever, and if her eyes glistened
with a light they had never seen before, and awed them, her lips
still smiled, and the old laugh came when she spoke to them. Their awe
increased. This was "getting religion" with a difference.

But presently they received a shock. A whisper grew that Laura was in
love with the Faith Healer. Some woman's instinct drove straight to the
centre of a disconcerting possibility, and in consternation she told her
husband; and Jansen husbands had a freemasonry of gossip. An hour, and
all Jansen knew, or thought they knew; and the "saved" rejoiced; and the
rest of the population, represented by Nicolle Terasse at one end and
Flood Rawley at the other, flew to arms. No vigilance committee was
ever more determined and secret and organised than the unconverted
civic patriots, who were determined to restore Jansen to its old-time
condition. They pointed out cold-bloodedly that the Faith Healer had
failed three times where he had succeeded once; and that, admitting the
successes, there was no proof that his religion was their cause. There
were such things as hypnotism and magnetism and will-power, and abnormal
mental stimulus on the part of the healed--to say nothing of the Healing
Springs.

Carefully laying their plans, they quietly spread the rumour that
Ingles had promised to restore to health old Mary Jewell, who had been
bedridden ten years, and had sent word and prayed to have him lay his
hands upon her--Catholic though she was. The Faith Healer, face to face
with this supreme and definite test, would have retreated from it but
for Laura Sloly. She expected him to do it, believed that he could, said
that he would, herself arranged the day and the hour, and sang so much
exaltation into him, that at last a spurious power seemed to possess
him. He felt that there had entered into him something that could be
depended on, not the mere flow of natural magnetism fed by an outdoor
life and a temperament of great emotional force, and chance, and
suggestion--and other things. If, at first, he had influenced Laura,
some ill-controlled, latent idealism in h