"Let me take him to a private sanitarium in New York, well known to me as the best place in the United States for a person in his condition. It is a high-priced place, but you can afford it for the sake of the relief of mind you would experience in removing this threatening danger from Ellsworth, and in knowing that his hopelessly incurable insanity had the kindest treatment." Those two words caught her instant attention. "You honestly believe him hopelessly insane?" she cried. "Yes," he replied; saying, inwardly: "God forgive me for lying, but it is in a righteous cause!" In fact, he was quaking with fear lest she should suspect the motive lying at the bottom of his anxiety to take his patient to New York. If she had been a well-read woman, he would have been afraid to risk such a plot; but he knew that she scarcely ever scanned the columns of a newspaper. Otherwise she would have been cognizant of the new scientific discovery, one of the greatest of the nineteenth century triumphs, and most important to the medical cult--the discovery of the wonderful X-ray of light by the famous German savant, Professor Roentgen. She would have known that by the operation of this X-ray the formerly dense human body could be made transparent enough to be seen through, revealing not only the skeleton with all its delicate mechanism, but the presence of every foreign element, so that already bullets had been located and removed from the bodies of patients who had suffered tortures from them for years. These wonderful facts filled the columns of newspapers and the pages of magazines. The whole world was wild with enthusiasm. It was the greatest and most beneficial discovery of the nineteenth century, they said, and Professor Roentgen's thoughtful brow was laureled with a fame that made him greater than a king. Mrs. Ellsworth had never read a line about the X-ray. If you had asked her she would not have understood what you meant. But every fiber of the intelligent old doctor's body vibrated with joy of the new discovery, and the hope that through its means his patient might be restored to health. The dream that he dreamed night and day was to carry Lovelace Ellsworth to New York and have the bullet in his head located by means of the wonderful X-ray. "Once located it might in all probability be removed, and your master restored to himself," he said confidentially to the clever Franklin, who rejoiced exceedingly at this little ray of hope in the darkness of his master's fate. But realizing the deep interest Mrs. Ellsworth had in preventing Love's restoration to reason, they knew it was useless to tell her of the new discovery with any hope of her consent to having any experiment tried on her step-son. Nothing remained to them but strategy, and they resorted to its use with flattering success. Mrs. Ellsworth had had so many triumphs, that she regarded this one as only her due--a reward of her clever plotting, as it were.