"It's working!" whispered the wizard. "The power is working."
Silence again. Then a sudden, overpowering peal of laughter from the medium—hearty, rippling, irrepressible and irresistible.
"Oh, Lady Meg, I feel such a fool—oh, such a fool!" she cried—and her laughter mastered her again.
Irresistible! Marie Zerkovitch joined in Casimir's hearty mirth, Mantis's shrill cackle and the sniggers of the dowagers swelled the chorus. Casimir sprang up and turned up the gas, laughing still. The wizard stood scowling savagely; Lady Meg glared malignantly at her ill-chosen medium and disappointing protégée.
"What's the reason for it, Lord help you?" she snarled, with a very nasty look at Pharos.
He saw the danger. His influence was threatened, his patroness's belief in him shaken.
"I don't know," he answered, in apparent humility. "I can't account for it. It happens, so far as I know, only in one case—and Heaven forbid that I should suggest that of mademoiselle."
"What is the case?" snapped Lady Meg, by no means pacified—in fact, still dangerously sceptical.
Pharos made an answer, grave and serious in tone in purpose and effect malignantly nonsensical: "When the person whom it is sought to subject to this particular influence (he touched the pocket where his precious disk now lay) has the Evil Eye."
An appeal to a superstition old as the hills and widespread as the human race—would it ever fail to hit some mark in a company of a dozen? Casimir laughed in hearty contempt, Sophy laughed in mischievous mockery. But two of the dowagers crossed themselves, Lady Meg started and glowered—and little Madame Zerkovitch marked, recorded, and remembered. Her mind was apt soil for seed of that order.