"I am very glad you did, although I had no fear. I knew my father would find the right way when the time came. Let me tell you, sir," she replied, expanding in the warmth of his interest. "Before these revelations came to me I had no real faith in God or heaven. The world beyond the grave was dark and cold. It seemed to me as if my little boy and my husband were in the cruel, wet ground. I couldn't feel that they had gone to Christ. But now the tomb is but a portal to the light. The spirit-plane is as real as the earth-plane, and filled with joyous souls. I can hear them sing sometimes when I hold Viola's hand, and the sound is very beautiful and very comforting."
"I can understand that," he answered, but quietly, critically, still studying her face. "It has a warmer charm than any other religion I know."
She went on, eagerly: "I wish you could come to believe. Your sister said your mother and your uncle spoke last night. Why can't you accept the faith?"
The young philosopher gained, as she spoke, a new conception of her character, and chilled with a growing sense of the difficult and ungracious task which lay before him. He began to perceive that her awe of him had kept her silent, thus concealing from him the spirit of the evangelist which he now saw she possessed. She counted more largely in Viola's development than he had hitherto granted. Her faith was solidly based on years of experience and was not to be easily moved. As she went on he perceived that her daughter's mediumship was much more than a theory in her thought; it was a fact, and a daily, almost an hourly, necessity. He lost his last suspicion of her, and caught a glimpse of the larger aspect of her relationship to his future. She was deceived, of course, but she was honest in every fibre. He could not accuse her of the slightest deceit or falsification.
In her lame way she tried to argue the question, quoting the platitudes of the "inspirational speakers," as well as the pompous phrases of her spirit-father, while he listened courteously.
When she paused, he said, gravely: "My dear Mrs. Lambert, I can't leave you in any doubt of my position. I cannot for a single instant accept what happened last night as the manifestation of the disembodied. I cannot think that the phenomena exist. I must rather think they were performed by Clarke, or my sister, or Weissmann, in joke." She looked at him with an expression of horror, of incredulity, and he went on, quickly: "Even if I admitted the fact of direct writing or the movement of the horn, I should not by any means be driven to accept your spirit-hypothesis. There are men, and very great investigators, who would say that your daughter's trances and all phenomena connected therewith were pathologic, explainable on the grounds of some obscure neural derangement. I do not say this is the case, but I do say that if she persists in these practices she will lose control of her mental faculties. I have had a consultation to-day with Dr. Tolman, a man who makes a specialty of such cases, and when I had laid the whole matter before him, he and Dr. Weissmann both advised the immediate stopping of these trances."