"I remember having a fight with a city boy by the name of Barker," said Victor, "because he yelled at me 'sonova medium' till I stopped his mouth with my fist. It seems to me as if it were the very next day that my mother took me to Mirror Lake and put me in a boarding-school. That fight must have influenced her. Perhaps up to that moment our neighbors had let us alone. I can understand now why she always visited me and why she never offered to take me to the city." He did not say that this very aloofness had made of her, to him, a serene and lofty figure, but so it was. She had come to him out of the unknown distance, a mysterious queen of the fairies, with something very sad and very sweet in her face and something very appealing in her voice. There was nothing commonplace, nothing associated with toil or worry in his memory of her. Her broad, full brow, her deep-blue eyes, and her frail little body put her apart from other women. As he dwelt now on her dignity, her loving care, his heart grew strong with resolution. "Gilbert," he called, suddenly, "I'm going down there and defend her from those beasts." Frenson was not surprised. "I reckon that's your little stunt," he retorted, student-fashion, but he was very much in earnest, nevertheless. "I'm wondering what old Boyden will say." Victor believed in Professor Boyden and honored him, but at the moment the thought of facing him was painful. Boyden was one of those who tested the human soul with the electric bell, the clock, and the spymograph. Delusions were among his hobbies. Hysteria was a great word with him. Man lived among appearances. Personality was not a unit, but an aggregate, liable to disassociation, and the hysterical girl was capable of deceiving the very elect. To him, mediumship was merely the sign of immorality or epilepsy. A part of this disrupting philosophy had entered Victor's head, and as he slowly and minutely re-read that cruel newspaper analysis of his sweet and gentle mother he was startled, but a little comforted by the thought that she might be the victim of her subconscious self, "She can't mean to cheat. Of that I am certain. But she needs me just the same. I'm going to earn her living and mine in some honest way." Two or three of his most intimate friends came up after breakfast and started in to chaff, but, being far past the stage of evasion, Victor frankly confessed his relationship to the medium and hotly defended her, ending by mournfully, declaring his intention of leaving school at once and forever. Thereupon, his visitors also became very serious, perceiving the tumult of doubt and despair into which he had been thrown, and one by one they fell into awkward silence and slipped away, leaving him alone with Frenson, who had been giving the most careful thought to the whole situation.