she feels that it is not right to conceal her light."

Maurice was too unsophisticated to understand why Mrs. Rangely's talk
struck him as not entirely genuine, but he was to some extent
enlightened when his cousin said to him afterward: "Frances Rangely has
the imitation Boston patter at her tongue's end now, but she is too
thoroughly a New Yorker ever to get the spirit of it. She rattles off
the words in a way that is intensely amusing."

The shutters of the small parlor in which the company was assembled had
been closed and the gas lighted. There were about a dozen guests, and
all had the air of being of some position. While the hostess went to
summon the medium, Maurice asked in a whisper if the master of the
house was present, and was answered that Fred Rangely was too clever to
be mixed up in this sort of thing. Wynne caught a satirical glance
between his cousin and Miss Morison, and more than ever he felt that
the meeting was a farce in which he, vowed to a nobler life, should
have had no part.

His musings were cut short by the entrance of Mrs. Rangely with the
medium. He recognized Mrs. Singleton at a glance, and was struck as he
had been before by the appealing look of innocence. She was a slender,
almost beautiful woman, with exquisite shell-like complexion, and
delicate features. An entire lack of moral sense frequently gives to a
woman an air of complete candor and purity, and Alice Singleton stood
before the company as the incarnation of sincerity and truth. Her face
was of the rounded, full-lipped, wistful type; the sensuous, selfish
face moulded into the likeness of childlike guilelessness which of all
the multitudinous varieties of the "ever womanly" is the one most
likely to be destructive.