But the attendant quietly retreated before him, looking him calmly in the eye, and, as Ray pressed closely upon him, he made a few passes before his face with his hands.

Instantly the young man began to experience that same sense of weariness and drowsiness that had over-powered him when those masterful eyes had fastened themselves upon him through the hole in the wall.

“Don’t! don’t!” he cried, throwing out his arms as if to ward off the influence, while he tried to resist it with all his will-power.

But his arm fell powerless by his side and he sank into a chair near which he was standing, and the attendant turned and left the room, a smile of peculiar satisfaction on his face.

“That was very well done, I think, for a pupil of the great Doctor Wesselhoff,” he muttered, as he shot the bolt into the socket and turned to go about other duties.  “It will not be long before I shall be able to exert the power as skillfully as he does.”

Ray sat as one half dazed for a few moments after the departure of Mr. Huff, and tried to combat with all the strength of his will the strange desire to sleep.

Then suddenly his glance became riveted upon something that was clinging to the leg of his trousers.

He stooped to pick it off, examining it closely, and uttered an exclamation of surprise upon finding that it was a small piece of ladies’ cloth of a delicate mauve color.

“Ha!” he cried, excitedly; “it is as precious as gold dust, and may prove to be very useful to me.  How fortunate I am to have found it!”

It was a small piece of woolen goods that had been torn from Mrs. Vanderbeck’s dress, and Ray, after a moment, put it carefully away in his pocket-book, in the hope of some time finding the rent that it would fit.

It was true that Doctor Wesselhoff had been suddenly called away to his sick wife.

No other summons would have had the power to draw him away from New York at that time, for he experienced great anxiety and interest regarding the new and peculiar case that had just been confided to his care.

He really believed that Ray—­or young Walton, as he believed his patient’s name to be, in spite of the fact that he had given it as Palmer—­was a monomaniac; for his words and manner fully corroborated the statement which his visitor of the previous day had made to him.  He had not the slightest suspicion that he also was the dupe of a cunning plot to secure diamonds that were worth a large sum of money.

But before leaving the city he gave the most careful directions to his pupil, Doctor Huff, who had been studying with him for more than a year, regarding the treatment of his patient, and then he was obliged to hurry away, promising, however, that he would return just as soon as it would do to leave his wife.

It took him two days of continuous travel to reach his destination, and then he found Mrs. Wesselhoff so very ill that all his thought and care were concentrated upon her.