The Wanderer was silent, being yet undetermined how to act, and still
unsteadied by what he had experienced. But he was able to reason, and he
asked of his judgment what he should do, wondering what manner of woman
Unorna might prove to be, and whether she was anything more than one of
those who live and even enrich themselves by the exercise of the unusual
faculties of powers nature has given them. He had seen many of that
class, and he considered most of them to be but half fanatics, half
charlatans, worshipping in themselves as something almost divine that
which was but a physical power, or weakness, beyond their own limited
comprehension. Though a whole school of wise and thoughtful men had
already produced remarkable results and elicited astounding facts by
sifting the truth through a fine web of closely logical experiment,
it did not follow that either Unorna, or any other self-convinced,
self-taught operator could do more than grope blindly towards the light,
guided by intuition alone amongst the varied and misleading phenomena
of hypnotism. The thought of accepting the help of one who was probably,
like most of her kind, a deceiver of herself and therefore, and thereby,
of others, was an affront to the dignity of his distress, a desecration
of his love's sanctity, a frivolous invasion of love's holiest ground.
But, on the other hand, he was stimulated to catch at the veriest
shadows of possibility by the certainty that he was at last within the
same city with her he loved, and he knew that hypnotic subjects are
sometimes able to determine the abode of persons whom no one else can
find. To-morrow it might be too late. Even before to-day's sun had set
Beatrice might be once more taken from him, snatched away to the ends
of the earth by her father's ever-changing caprice. To lose a moment now
might be to lose all.

He was tempted to yield, to resign his will into Unorna's hands, and his