"I'm glad I can beat you at something," she said, with exultant cruelty. "I know you can row." "Shall we try another set?" he asked. "Not to-day, thank you. My self-respect will not stand another such drubbing. I'm going in for a cold plunge. After that you may read to me on the porch." "I'll be there with the largest tome in the library," he replied. Mrs. Joyce stopped him as he was going up-stairs to his room. "Victor, don't worry about me. While it looks as though I have lost a good deal of money through Pettus, I am by no means bankrupt. I am just about where I was when I met your mother. She has not enriched me--I mean The Voices have not--neither have they impoverished me. It's just the same with Leo. She's almost exactly where she was when she came East. It would seem as if they had been playing with us just to show us how unsubstantial earthly possessions are." There was a certain comfort in this explanation, and yet the fact that her losses had not eaten in upon her original capital did not remove the essential charge of dishonesty which the man Aiken had brought against the ghostly advisers. Florence and Thomas Aiken could not afford to be so lenient. They were disinherited, cheated of their rightful legacy, by the lying spirits. He was anxious, also, to know just how deeply Leo was involved in the People's Bank; and when she came down to the porch he led her to a distant chair beside a hammock on the eastern side of the house, and there, with a book in his hand, opened his interrogations. He began quite formally, and with a well-laid-out line of questions, but she was not the kind of witness to permit that. She broke out of his boundaries on the third query, and laughingly refused to discuss her losses. "I am holding no one but myself responsible," she said. "I was greedy--I couldn't let well enough alone, that's all." "No, that is not all," he insisted. "My mother is charged with advising people to put money into the hands of a swindler--" "I don't believe that. I think she was honest in believing that Pettus would enrich us all. She was deceived like the rest of us." "But what becomes of the infallible Voices?" She laughed. "They are fallible, that's all. They made a gross blunder in Pettus." "Mr. Bartol suggests that my mother may have been hypnotized by Pettus and made to work his will, and I think he's right. He thinks the whole thing comes down to illusion--to hypnotic control and telepathy." She looked thoughtful. "I had a stage of believing that; but it doesn't explain all, it only explains a small part. Does it explain Altair to you?" His glance fell. "Nothing explains Altair--nor that moaning wind--nor the writing on the slates." "And the letter--have you forgotten that?" "Half an hour ago, as we were playing tennis, I _had_ forgotten it. I was cut loose from the whole blessed mess--now it all comes back upon me like a cloud."