"I don't see how the mother can stand by and see her daughter's life burned away."
"She, in her turn, seems enslaved to the dead. She has often told me that her father's spirit is leading her every movement."
"That particular ghost is Clarke—don't you think?"
Britt's eyes narrowed. "I don't know. I have never been able to connect him directly with a single one of these manifestations, and yet he must be at the bottom of part of it."
"It all comes back, then, to the girl herself."
Britt rose uneasily. "I repeat I am completely at sea. I have studied every line of old Randall's notes till I'm 'dopy' myself. Everything has conspired to make the girl hysterical—to fasten some accursed mental weakness upon her. If I could have stopped it two years ago she might have outgrown it. Every year now makes it less easy for her to shake it off—whatever it is."
"Atrocious!" exclaimed Serviss. "Has no one authority to act?"
Britt shrugged his shoulders. "What would you do when both parents—the living and the dead—consent? Only a husband could intervene, and Clarke seems to be about to claim that place. No, I see no hope for the girl. She may be right, after all, in joining Clarke."
Serviss rose to release the emotional tension under which he had kept his limbs. "You don't know their present plans?"
"No, only that Clarke is going to publish soon." He looked round the room. "What a development since my time! Bacteriology and auto-transportation are neck and neck in their amazing expansion."