The tantalizing good nature with which she spoke humiliated Wynne. She seemed to be playing with him, and he resented her reflection upon his creed. He was, however, too much under the spell of his cousin to be really angry, and he was silenced rather than offended. They entered the house to find several of the persons whom he had seen at Mrs. Gore's on the day previous; and Wynne was at once charmed and disquieted by the entrance a moment later of Miss Morison, who came in looking more beautiful than ever. It gave him a feeling of exultation to be sharing her life, even in this chance way.
The preliminaries of the sitting were not elaborate. Mrs. Rangely, the hostess, impressed it upon her guests that Mrs. Singleton, the medium, was not a professional, but that she was with them only in the capacity of one who wished to use her peculiar gifts in the search for truth.
"She does not understand her powers herself," Mrs. Rangely said; "but she feels that it is not right to conceal her light."
Maurice was too unsophisticated to understand why Mrs. Rangely's talk struck him as not entirely genuine, but he was to some extent enlightened when his cousin said to him afterward: "Frances Rangely has the imitation Boston patter at her tongue's end now, but she is too thoroughly a New Yorker ever to get the spirit of it. She rattles off the words in a way that is intensely amusing."
The shutters of the small parlor in which the company was assembled had been closed and the gas lighted. There were about a dozen guests, and all had the air of being of some position. While the hostess went to summon the medium, Maurice asked in a whisper if the master of the house was present, and was answered that Fred Rangely was too clever to be mixed up in this sort of thing. Wynne caught a satirical glance between his cousin and Miss Morison, and more than ever he felt that the meeting was a farce in which he, vowed to a nobler life, should have had no part.
His musings were cut short by the entrance of Mrs. Rangely with the medium. He recognized Mrs. Singleton at a glance, and was struck as he had been before by the appealing look of innocence. She was a slender, almost beautiful woman, with exquisite shell-like complexion, and delicate features. An entire lack of moral sense frequently gives to a woman an air of complete candor and purity, and Alice Singleton stood before the company as the incarnation of sincerity and truth. Her face was of the rounded, full-lipped, wistful type; the sensuous, selfish face moulded into the likeness of childlike guilelessness which of all the multitudinous varieties of the "ever womanly" is the one most likely to be destructive.