"What is her relation to Clarke?" asked Serviss, hesitatingly.
"Well, now, I don't know. Sometimes I think he controls her by some infernal hypnotic power; and then again, from some phrase of her own, I think she considers her mind diseased, and marriage with any one else impossible."
"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."
Thereupon they dropped all reference to the Lamberts and their trials, and turned their minds upon phagocytes and other ravening mites whose likes and dislikes, minute as they are, work more devastation than cannon.
Serviss's work was over for that day; after Britt went away he sat idly at his desk, his mind busy with the revolting pictures called up by what he had heard of Viola. "They are destroying a beautiful soul," he exclaimed, bitterly, as he recalled the charm of her face and voice on that ride to the mine. "They are forcing a charming girl into an abominable life, they are warping her moral fibre into ugliness and death--and Clarke is the fanatic devil of the scheme."
The desire to see her, to talk with her, to measure the change in her grew very strong--so strong that he meditated a call, but the thought of Clarke cut the resolution off before it was fully formed. "Probably Britt is right--Clarke's rotten soul has fatally infected hers."