"Very well. We will set to work at once, for our case may come up this week. At its lowest terms, the Aiken charge involves—to us—the admission that our client is highly suggestible and that she has been used as an unconscious stool-pigeon by Pettus. For the present we must proceed upon this basis. Suggestion is more or less accepted at the present time, and we may be able to get the jury to admit our plea; but I will not conceal from you the fact that your mother stands in danger of severe punishment. The Star has singled her out as a scapegoat, and is behind the Aikens. They will push her hard. I do not think they will follow her here, but if they do I shall send you to my nephew's home.—Now to Morselli. We must know just where he stands on this amazing branch of biology. Will you make this synopsis to-day?"
Victor's eyes glowed with the fire of his awakened pride and resolution. "If you'll let me help you, Mr. Bartol, I'll show you what my training has been. I'm quick in some things. I will collate and put in order all the latest deductions of science—" He stopped. "But what exactly do you intend to do with my mother?"
"I mean to confine her in such wise as to demonstrate precisely what she can do and what she cannot. I must divide what is conscious from that which is unconscious. I must understand precisely how she produces these messages, voices, and faces. We are agreed that she is not consciously deceptive?" He questioned Victor with a glance.
"I know she is honest."
"Very well, we must demonstrate her honesty. We must photograph her so-called materializations side by side with her own body, and we must register the work of these invisible hands, and in every possible way demonstrate that she is the medium and not the originating cause of these messages. In no other way can we save her from disgrace and a prison cell."
The youth went away with a humming sound in his head. The thought of his gentle little mother herded with vile women within the gray walls of a penitentiary filled him with such horror that his face went drawn and white. "It shall not be! I will not have it so!" he said, and yet he saw no other way in which to prevent it. All depended upon the man whose impassioned words still rang in his ears, and his admiration for the lawyer rose to that love which youth yields to the highest manhood.
Mrs. Joyce met him in the hall, excited, eager. "What did he say?"
Victor passed his hand over his face in bewilderment. "I must think," he protested. "He said so much—Where is mother?"
"She is on the porch—waiting. Let us go out to her."
He followed her with troubled face, but the bright sunshine and the songs of the birds miraculously restored him. He looked up and down the piazza hoping to see Leo, but she was not in sight. He took a seat in silence, and Mrs. Joyce saw his mother grow pale in sympathy as she read the trouble in his face.