"Oh, certainly! Once we get her amenable, then we can suggest that she _must_ marry Bindon--that that is her fate; or that the young man is repulsive, and that when she sees him she will be giddy and faint, or any little thing of that sort. Or if we can get her into a sufficiently profound trance we can suggest that she should forget him altogether--" "Precisely." "But the problem is to get her hypnotised. Of course no sort of proposal or suggestion must come from you--because no doubt she already distrusts you in the matter." The hypnotist leant his head upon his arm and thought. "It's hard a man cannot dispose of his own daughter," said Mwres irrelevantly. "You must give me the name and address of the young lady," said the hypnotist, "and any information bearing upon the matter. And, by the bye, is there any money in the affair?" Mwres hesitated. "There's a sum--in fact, a considerable sum--invested in the Patent Road Company. From her mother. That's what makes the thing so exasperating." "Exactly," said the hypnotist. And he proceeded to cross-examine Mwres on the entire affair. It was a lengthy interview. And meanwhile "Elizebeθ Mwres," as she spelt her name, or "Elizabeth Morris" as a nineteenth-century person would have put it, was sitting in a quiet waiting-place beneath the great stage upon which the flying-machine from Paris descended. And beside her sat her slender, handsome lover reading her the poem he had written that morning while on duty upon the stage. When he had finished they sat for a time in silence; and then, as if for their special entertainment, the great machine that had come flying through the air from America that morning rushed down out of the sky. At first it was a little oblong, faint and blue amidst the distant fleecy clouds; and then it grew swiftly large and white, and larger and whiter, until they could see the separate tiers of sails, each hundreds of feet wide, and the lank body they supported, and at last even the swinging seats of the passengers in a dotted row. Although it was falling it seemed to them to be rushing up the sky, and over the roof-spaces of the city below its shadow leapt towards them. They heard the whistling rush of the air about it and its yelling siren, shrill and swelling, to warn those who were on its landing-stage of its arrival. And abruptly the note fell down a couple of octaves, and it had passed, and the sky was clear and void, and she could turn her sweet eyes again to Denton at her side. Their silence ended; and Denton, speaking in a little language of broken English that was, they fancied, their private possession--though lovers have used such little languages since the world began--told her how they too would leap into the air one morning out of all the obstacles and difficulties about them, and fly to a sunlit city of delight he knew of in Japan, half-way about the world.