"No, I have not," said Miss Bowyer; "but I was going to do so to-day."
"I don't like to dispute the word of a lady," he said, "but you know that you are not a proper practitioner, and that in case of a contagious disease the Board of Health would put you out of here neck and heels, if I must speak so roughly. Mrs. Martin is my aunt. If you make any trouble, I shall feel obliged to have you arrested at once. If you go home quietly and do not say a word to Mr. Martin, I'll let you off. You have no doubt lost patients of this kind before, and if I look up your record—"
"My hat and cloak are in there," said Miss Bowyer.
"If you renounce the case and say no more to Mr. Martin I will not follow you up," said Charley; "but turn your hand against Mrs. Martin, and I'll spend a thousand dollars to put you in prison."
This put a new aspect on the case in Miss Bowyer's mind. That Mrs. Martin had influential friends she had not dreamed. Miss Bowyer had had one tilt with the authorities, and she preferred not to try it again.
"My hat and cloak are in there," she repeated, pushing on the door.
"Stand aside," said Millard, "and I will get them."
Somehow Millard had reached Miss Bowyer's interior perception and put her into the conscious, impressible, passive state, in which his will was hers. She moved to the other side of the dark hall in such a state of mind that she could hardly have told whether the magnetism of her brain was in the cerebrum or in the cerebellum or in a state of oscillation between the two.
"Aunt Hannah," called Millard, "open the door."
The bolt was shoved back by Mrs. Martin. Millard opened the door a little way, holding the knob firmly in his right hand. Mrs. Martin stood well out of sight behind the door, from an undefined fear of getting in range of Miss Bowyer, whose calm bullying had put Mrs. Martin into some impassive state not laid down in works on Christian Science.