But Kenneth merely gave a chill smile and lifted his head a little higher. His dislike of Mrs. Gallup had not been personal. He loathed, as if through indomitable instinct, all that she represented. This detestation of every alleged claim to wield occult and necromantic powers formed a sort of corollary to his reverence for the firm exactitudes of science.

The séance began soon afterward. It was held, of course, in a darkened room. Earlier in the evening Aurelia had spoken, with tones of expectant rapture, regarding the blessed chances of a "materialization." It seemed as if Mrs. Gallup might be so favored by some of her spiritual allies as to produce one, and a very handsome specimen of its grisly kind as well; for in the almost pitchy darkness that now filled the room she suddenly said, with a voice of hollow resonance,

"Margaret Stafford, your little girl, Elsie, that you lost years ago, is a child o' light now, and would like to let her ma see what a 'cute and sweet little dearie they've made out of her, off there into the summer-land."

Mrs. Stafford started, and shuddered audibly in the gloom. Her first-born, Elsie, had indeed died years ago, but the wound of that loss had never wholly healed, as so many a mother will understand. But her sensation was not only one of pain; terror mixed with it. She stretched out one hand gropingly for Kenneth, who had been seated next her at the lowering of the light. But she could not find him. Where had he gone? She had not heard him leave his chair. "Kenneth," she called, in a low whisper. No answer came.

"How . . how marvellous!" the voice of Aurelia was now heard to quiver. "I never dreamed of mentioning poor little Elsie's name to Mrs. Gallup."

"I think we'd better be quite quiet, hadn't we?" said Effingham. There was a silence, during which Mrs. Stafford's terror grew. She felt like screaming her boy's name aloud. If the little dead one were to come back, she wanted Kenneth near by; he had somehow got to be so strong and big, of late; and then she wasn't ever at all sure, nowadays, about her feeble nerves.

"I guess little Elsie 'll come," at length proclaimed Mrs. Gallup, though with the effect of a person who talks in sleep. And then, in a monotonous, droning whine, "Come, little petty . . . come away from them heavenly blooms and birds you're a-playing among; come here for a little while and see your own darling mommer, that ain't forgot you yet, nor never can."

For the mother who heard them these nasal strains might have been the rarest euphony, while it is doubtful if she even noted the raw vulgarity of their appeal. The longing, the agitation which they roused had slight concern with their tone, their taste, or their grammar. Like many religious people, she was easily impressed by just such quackeries as the spiritualist, the occultist, the theosophist, the Christian scientist, or whatever he may choose to call himself, may care to deal in. She stretched forth her yearning arms as a vague light stole through some sort of aperture yards beyond. Slowly the rays increased until they made one broad shaft on curtain and carpet. And then,

suddenly, but with no more sound than the coming of the light itself, a small shape, clad in white, with a lovely childish face and a pair of lifted arms, glided into view.

Sobs broke from Mrs. Stafford. "My child! my Elsie!" she exclaimed.

"Hush!" said Mrs. Gallup, with a dreadful solemnity.

"Hush, Margaret!" gasped Aurelia.

And now Mrs. Stafford's imagination went wildly to work. She distinctly recognized the child whom she had lost years before. She had not a doubt but that her own dead little Elsie stood in spectral beauty just yonder. A cry-an eager maternal cry-trembled on her lips, when the swift darting from shadow of another shape stilled it. A moment later she saw that Kenneth had seized the child. Then there came a shrill, babyish scream, and some one rushed toward the chandelier with its turned-down gas-jets, making each, in quick succession, burn again mercilessly bright.

There stood Kenneth, near the drawn portière of the adjacent dining-room, with a laugh of terrible scorn that drowned the affrighted wails of the child he was holding. But he held it very tenderly, and almost at once, after the spectacular éclaircissement (which had been wrought by none other than Luke, an old butler long resident in the Stafford family), he brought the dismayed little girl over to his mother, saying, with clear, vibrant voice,

"There, you see she's only somebody else's flesh-and-blood child, after all! Kiss her and hug her all you please, poor little frightened thing. She deserves it for being made the tool of that wretched old mountebank there!"

He turned to Mrs. Gallup as he spoke the last words, and contempt flashed from his ardent young eyes, glad with the joy of a complete victory.

Soon afterward, to the humiliation of Aurelia, every detail of the real truth transpired. Kenneth had heard from Hilda, his mother's devoted maid and his own former nurse, certain words which had caused him to suspect that Mrs. Gallup had been trying to corrupt one of the other female servants. Whatever may have been the medium's triumphs at private residences in previous times, her vicious arts had failed her in the present instance. She had bribed too much or too little; the maid whom she had insidiously approached had betrayed her, and Kenneth, with his hot young soul aflame for the exposure of charlatanism, had not found it hard to enlist on his side the Swiss woman, Hilda, who adored him, or the old Irish butler, Luke, who held him in devoted esteem.

Mrs. Gallup went away crestfallen and feeless. Kenneth had proved himself a power against which the innuendoes of his aunt and the morose mutterings of Effingham were alike futile. His mother clung to him more than ever after that night when he had so pitilessly yet with so austere a kindliness brought to her side the little guiltless, hired minion of Mrs. Gallup's detected chicanery. In spite of his youth, Kenneth now became the real head of the household. Even Aurelia bowed to him, with no more muffled complaints against his

"cold-bloodedness" or "lack of sentiment." But his reign as acknowledged autocrat proved, nevertheless, a brief one.

V.

Only a few months later Mrs. Stafford, whose health had not for years been strong, suddenly sickened and died. Kenneth was overwhelmed with horror and loneliness at her demise. It changed him for a long period. He would scarcely see or speak to one of his tutors; there were moments when he meditated suicide.

The news of his aunt's prospective marriage with Effingham woke him into comparative action. He disliked them both, and appeared at their wedding in deep mourning, scarcely uttering a syllable. Soon afterward he made up his mind to go abroad, and as soon as his financial affairs could be arranged according to the terms of his mother's will, he departed for Europe. Mrs. Stafford had been rich in her own right, and had left certain amounts to religious charities. Kenneth paid over all these sums, and found himself afterward possessed of a large fortune, the heritage of both his parents.

Reaching Europe, he went almost directly to Germany. He knew his own ignorance, just as he was perfectly aware of his own exceptional attainments. He gave himself in the humblest spirit up to the instructors of the Berlin University, and soon became aware that an enormous amount of study waited between his ambitions and their potential span. But he was prepared to shirk no height of toil, and in his later career as a student of science he won shining distinction. The new atmosphere tingled for him with a most welcome stimulus. Intercourse with congenial minds at first nearly intoxicated him by its delicious novelty. This life of the university, as he soon perceived, filled a yawning vacuum in his nature. He was now a living refutation of the cynical words "Tout notre mal vient de ne pouvoir être seul." It seemed sometimes to Kenneth as if absolute solitude would henceforth become hateful; he forever sought an interchange of ideas with his co-disciples, and frequently dispensed to them on this very account entertainment which his well-filled purse made a light enough consideration. For such reason, and for others as well, he was popular. His freshness amazed and pleased everybody. He went about seeking knowledge everywhere and from all informants. "He is not a man,' said one of the students: "he is a thirst." 'No, an enthusiasm," preferred another. They called him kenntnissverrückt behind his back, and made amiable sport of him for his craze after knowledge of a certain character. But they all liked him for his fine simplicity and that species of courtesy which holds no man, not even the meanest, an unimportant factor in social forces. For nothing so flatters the ordinary human intellect as to become convinced of its own instructive value. The moment you make a fellow-creature believe that he can help you by information which at once costs him nothing and yet shows forth any of his own mental equipments, you have created an eager, if temporary, friend. And friends of this description Kenneth did create by the score. His drift was away from orthodoxy, and

plenty of encouragement with respect to this mood awaited him at the Berlin University. He was confronted, indeed, with not a few atheists, who occupied their leisure in shaping dauntless and biting epigrams which sounded like shibboleths to be printed glaringly on the banners of some future rationalistic revolt. But he revealed no sympathy with this mode of destroying conservative tenets. He had a rooted and inherent distrust of eloquence, and it gradually grew upon him that oratory as an art was one of the most harmful enemies of civilization. The deeper he plunged into science the more potently he was convinced of how its lustral waters cleansed the mind from every form of parasitic and clogging impediment. "I live," he once announced to a throng of intimates, "in search of nothing except the actual. Progress has for centuries lost untold opportunities through her hospitality toward imagination. All dreams are a disease; the really healthful sleep has none. It has often occurred to me that mankind now suffers from an immense and distracting toothache, called religion."

"Are you going to invent a cure for that toothache, Stafford ?" queried one of his companions, over their beer and pipes.

"No," said Kenneth. "But time will. They gave one of the mythic Fates a scissors; I would put into her hand a forceps, and have her pull out that 'raging tooth.' She's bound to do so sooner or later; she's tugging away at the nuisance now. When the entire world perceives that there is nothing to worship, it will comprehend that there will be nothing to feel afraid of,-not even death. For death, shorn of all ecclesiastic appendices, is really a most sweet falling asleep; and nature has prepared an annihilation of dusky yet enticing splendor. No gorgeous paradise of the Koran's most glowing pages ever equalled it. The dark slaves of oblivion wait upon us there; they are better than the loveliest houries; they can never be corrupted, for the simple reason that they are corruption itself."

"Aha!" cried one of his hearers, "you're a pessimist, then !"

"No," said Kenneth. "A pessimist is a rebel. I am a martyr." And he laughed a little. "I shall always believe in having the human race accommodate itself sensibly to the curse of consciousness."

That last phrase roused a roar of laughter from a certain clique of devotees at the grim shrines of Schopenhauer and Von Hartmann.

But Kenneth seldom obtruded his materialistic feelings. He nurtured them in silence, and with but few incidents of unreserved disclosure. They strengthened within him, however, as his course at the university continued. Year after year he reaped the highest honors. Electricity attracted him more than any other branch of science, and his environment gave him the best means for exhaustive researches. He was so rich that he could purchase the most precious instruments without a thought of their cost. Subjects that also keenly interested him were physiology and brain-structure in all their subtlest details. He was never tired of microscopic investigations with respect to animal tissue, nerve-cells, ganglia, cerebral mechanism. Our entire mortal coil, physical and mental, was a source of exquisite interest to him. He would spend hours before his microscope, gazing at bits of

human brain-matter in which evidence of some lesion like paresis had shown itself. It was declared of him that he had the temperament and mind of a great physician, if he should choose to make medicine his cult. But once, on hearing that this had been stated, he shook his head and dryly answered,

"Oh, no. Medicine is all a huge experiment. I prefer to know something."

His rationalism was completely bloodless. To him the only deity possible of belief was both centred and comprehended in nature. But he regarded such deity as a totally unconscious one, and hence neither blamable nor innocent. Of all philosophers, no doubt Spinoza most pleased and satisfied him, though throughout the last year of his residence at the university he cared but little for philosophy of any sort. It seemed to him that there was only one book worth reading, one enigma worth solving. Through what strange and thrilling stages of development had man reached his present majestic condition upon this planet? There were times when the youth in Kenneth's blood mingled. with the scholar that was part of his being, and caused him to feel as if he could almost plunge thought æons back into the past until it had made bold to pluck priceless riches along its pathway, bidding the rocks render up new treasures from their caverns and the rivers to babble new secrets with their liquid lips. Man!-to understand his beginning and the slow crescendo that had followed! How triumphant an Edipus it would take to solve such a riddle! And yet Kenneth often told himself that he had intuitively solved it. Man, the crown and flower of all evolutional progress, though having attained a higher place in the great plan than any other of his animal kindred, was intrinsically neither more nor less than the earth from which fable had long ago claimed that he sprang. A certain mysterious and beautiful law had acted upon him more stringently and tellingly than upon vast hordes of other living creatures; a more heterogeneous entity had resulted, in his case, from the vast homogeneous One of inchoate matter. Psychology and anatomy had already both proved that between the brain of man and that of horse, lion, ape, or even of the invertebrates, there was a difference solely of degree. . . . And while he thus mused, Kenneth was never tired of repeating to himself certain words of Darwin, a writer who had impressed him with singular force:

". . . All living things have much in common, in their chemical composition, their germinal vesicles, their cellular structure, and their laws of growth and reproduction. We see this even in so trifling a circumstance as that the same poison often similarly affects plants and animals; or that the poison secreted by the gall-fly produces monstrous growths on the wild rose or oak-tree. Therefore I should infer by analogy that probably all the organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have descended from some one primordial form, into which life was first breathed."

Kenneth quitted the university keenly regretted by not a few of its best professorial adherents. One old and very wise instructor told him in serious tones, on a certain afternoon, that he had mastered the entire subject of electricity with an unparalleled power for one of his years.