“Well—hypnotism.”
“A mere toy, that Poe and Hawthorne played with in the old mesmerist days, and I don’t know how many others.”
“I don’t play with it as they did, exactly,” said Ray.
“Oh, I’ve no doubt you employ it to as new effect as the scientifics who are playing with it again. But how can you live in this camp of embattled forces, where luxury and misery are armed against each other, and every lover of his kind should give heart and brain to the solution of the riddle that is maddening brother against brother,—how can you live on here and be content with the artistic study of hysteria?”
The strong words of the old man, which fell tingling with emotion, had no meaning for the soul of youth in Ray; he valued them æsthetically, but he could not make personal application of them. He had a kind of amusement in answering: “Well, I’m not quite so bad as you think, Mr. Hughes. I wrote my story several years ago. I don’t suppose I could do anything of the kind, now.”
Hughes’s mouth seemed stopped for the moment by this excuse. He sat glaring at Ray’s bright, handsome face through his overhanging, shaggy eyebrows, and seemed waiting to gather strength for another onset, when his daughter Peace came silently into the room behind Ray.
Her father did not give her time to greet their visitor. “Well,” he called out with a voice of stormy pathos, “how did you leave that poor woman?”
“She is dead,” answered the girl.
“Good!” said Hughes. “So far, so good. Who is living?”
“There are several children. The people in the house are taking care of them.”