"Leave the room, James," he said hotly. "I'll see you later in the smoking-room." Then, to the nurse: "Remove the baby, will you, please? Thank you for letting us have him for an hour."
As soon as we were alone in the dining-room, Tom leaned toward me and said: "Shall I discharge James, my dear? He was most infernally impudent, to put it mildly."
But the frightful certainty had come to me that the butler was innocent of any wrong-doing. Absurd as the bald statement of fact seemed to be, my first husband was the guilty man, and, struggle as I might against the conviction, I knew it.
"Give him another chance, Tom." I managed to say, my voice unsteady and my tongue parched. "James was not quite himself, I imagine. I'm not well, Tom. Give me a swallow of cognac, will you, please?"
Tom, alarmed at my voice and face, hastily handed me a stimulant, and presently I felt my courage and my color coming back to me.
The priceless sight Springs to its curious organ, and the ear Learns strangely to detect the articulate air In its unseen divisions, and the tongue Gets its miraculous lesson with the rest. --_N. P. Willis_.
I longed, yet dreaded, to have an hour alone with the baby. I could no longer doubt that, through some psychical mischance, Jack's soul had found a lodgment in a family hospitable by habit and inclination, but not accustomed to disquieting intrusions. It was thus that I put the matter to myself, as I sat alone in my boudoir after luncheon, having dismissed Marie, my maid, with a message to Horatio's nurse; and the conventional make-up of my thought revealed to me, in a flash of insight, the materialistic tendencies of my mental methods. Metempsychosis had never assumed to my mind the dignity of even a philosophical working hypothesis. Much less had the idea ever come to me that reincarnation actually furnished a process through which the physical laws of evolution and the conservation of energy might find a psychical demonstration.
My natural inclination to take the world as I found it, and to leave the inner mysteries of life to profounder minds than mine, had been intensified by my association with Tom, a disciple of Haeckel, Büchner and other extremists of the materialistic school. I had come to admire Tom's intellectuality and to find satisfaction in the fact that his fondness for scientific studies would strengthen him to resist the temptations that surrounded him to become a mere man of leisure and luxury. Possessed of great wealth and without a profession, it was fortunate for Tom that he had found in scientific research an outlet for his superabundant energies. He had begun to make a reputation for himself as a clear-headed, well-balanced evolutionist, both conservative in method and progressive in spirit, and at our table could be found at times the leading scientific minds of New York. And now, into our little stronghold of enlightened materialism had been dropped a miraculous mystery, or mysterious miracle, that had overthrown all my preconceived ideas of the universe and opened before me a limitless field of groping conjecture. I realized, with due gratitude to fate, that if I had been born with an imaginative, poetical temperament my present predicament would have driven me insane at the outset. Fortunately for everybody concerned, I am a woman who rebounds quickly from the severest nervous shock, and I have taken a great deal of pride in retaining my mental poise in crises of my life that would have made hysteria excusable.