"Sleep," he said, in a low deep voice.
The two watchers saw a strange calmness steal over the patient's features. The convulsive movements of the poor, nerve-twitched body ceased, and, in a few moments more, quiet and regular breathing showed that the magnetic touch of the Teacher had indeed induced a tranquil slumber.
The old man looked on, shaking with anxiety.
"Master," he said, "can you cure him—can you heal him? He is my only son, all I've got left in the world—my only son!"
Eric Black, who had watched this curious scene with great interest and a considerable amount of pity, sighed. He was not inexperienced in illnesses, especially those terrible nervous collapses for which medical science can do nothing, and to which there is one inevitable end. He knew that no human skill could do anything for the sleeping and corpse-like figure upon the bed, and he wondered why Joseph had cared to accompany the old man and to buoy him up with false hopes.
Joseph did not immediately answer the old man's question about his son. Instead of that he turned quickly to the journalist.
"Yes," he said; "but with God all things are possible."
Black started violently. His very thoughts had been read instantly, and answered as swiftly. Then a curious resentment mounted in his brain against Joseph. Who was this man who sent a suffering invalid to sleep in a moment by his hypnotic touch; who brought terror, remorse, and shame into a great lighted theatre; who dared to tell the wealthiest and most influential people in London that they marched beneath the standard of Beelzebub; who even now had read his secret thoughts with unerring intuition?
With a slight sneer, foreign to his usual nature, but he was frightened and was trying to reassure himself, he said—
"That is all very well, sir, no doubt; but miracles do not happen."