She was not really in doubt, but she was under the imperious impulse of a passion which must needs find some response, even in the useless confirmation of its reality uttered by an indifferent person--the spirit of a mighty cry seeking its own echo in the echoless, flat waste of the Great Desert.
Then, too, she placed a sincere faith in the old man's answers to her questions, regardless of the matter inquired into.

She believed that in the mysterious condition between sleep and waking which she could command, the knowledge of things to be was with him as certainly as the memory of what had been and of what was even now passing in the outer world.

To her, the one direction of the faculty seemed no less possible than the others, though she had not yet attained alone to the vision of the future.

Hitherto the old man's utterances had been fulfilled to the letter.

More than once, as Keyork Arabian had hinted, she had consulted his second sight in preference to her own, and she had not been deceived.