the East has already brought to an uncanny perfection—of imposing one's will upon the will of another is being developed to a point which threatens some very ugly developments."
"That is just what one feels oneself," said Helen.
"Only the other day," said Wygram, "I was called in by the New York police to help in a terrible case which has made a great impression over there. It was that of a man, otherwise presumably sane, who committed a perfectly senseless and illogical crime because a deadly enemy, an expert practitioner of the new science, had been able to tamper with the mind of that man subconsciously while he slept."
"How dreadful!"
Wygram agreed that the speculations opened up by a fact so sinister were not pleasant. "The whole world is on the down grade," he said. "Man has played things up too high. For many years he has been dealing with unclean things—subtle poisons, high explosives, black magic. But to my mind this new science which has come out of the East is the worst of all, because it is by far the most elusive."
"Can it be used, do you suppose, on a large scale?"
"The fear is that it can be," said Wygram, "and that it will be. An unlucky signalman the other day at Hellington had a lapse of memory. The London express ran into a goods train that was being shunted out of a siding. Such a thing, in normal circumstances, should never occur. By reason of it, sixteen
