it
Laurie...?

"He is there, underneath," she whispered to herself softly; "he is
waiting for me to help him." She remembered that she must make that
act of faith. Yet was it Laurie who had looked in at his mother's
door...? Well, the door was locked now. But that secretive visit
seemed to her terrible.

What, then, did she believe?

She had put that question to herself fifty times, and found no answer.
The old man's solution was clear enough now: he believed no less than
that out of that infinitely mysterious void that lies beyond the veils
of sense there had come a Personality, strong, malignant, degraded,
and seeking to degrade, seizing upon this lad's soul, in the disguise
of a dead girl, and desiring to possess it. How fantastic that
sounded! Did she believe it? She did not know. Then there was the
solution of a nervous strain, rising to a climax of insanity. This was
the answer of the average doctor. Did she believe that? Was that
enough to account for the look in the boy's eyes? She did not know.

She understood perfectly that the fact of herself living under
conditions of matter made the second solution the more natural; yet
that did not content her. For her religion informed her emphatically
that discarnate Personalities existed which desired the ruin of human
souls, and, indeed, forbade the practices of spiritualism for this
very reason. Yet there was hardly a Catholic she knew who regarded the
possibility in these days as more than a theoretical one. So she
hesitated, holding her judgment in suspense. One thing only she saw
clearly, and that was that she must act as if she believed the former
solution: she must treat the boy as one obsessed, whether indeed he
were so or not. There was no other manner in which she could
concentrate her force upon the heart of the struggle. If there were no
evil Personality in the affair, it was necessary to assume one.

And still she waited.

There came back to her an old childish memory.

Once, as a child of ten, she had had to undergo a small operation. One
of the nuns had taken her to the doctor's house. When she had
understood that she must come into the next room and have it done, she
had stopped dead. The nun had encouraged her.

"Leave me quite alone, please, Mother, just for one minute. Please
don't speak. I'll come in a minute."

After a minute's waiting, while they looked at her, she had gone
forward, sat down in the chair and behaved quite perfectly. Yes