It fell about her
like the texture of a summer cloud, with a kind of vagueness, so that
the outline of the form beneath it could not be accurately discerned.
But the movement of the Veiled Lady was graceful, free, and
unembarrassed, like that of a person accustomed to be the spectacle
of thousands; or, possibly, a blindfold prisoner within the sphere
with which this dark earthly magician had surrounded her, she was
wholly unconscious of being the central object to all those straining
eyes.
Pliant to his gesture (which had even an obsequious courtesy, but at
the same time a remarkable decisiveness), the figure placed itself in
the great chair. Sitting there, in such visible obscurity, it was,
perhaps, as much like the actual presence of a disembodied spirit as
anything that stage trickery could devise. The hushed breathing of
the spectators proved how high-wrought were their anticipations of
the wonders to be performed through the medium of this
incomprehensible creature. I, too, was in breathless suspense, but
with a far different presentiment of some strange event at hand.
"You see before you the Veiled Lady, said the bearded Professor,
advancing to the verge of the platform. "By the agency of which I
have just spoken, she is at this moment in communion with the
spiritual world. That silvery veil is, in one sense, an enchantment,
having been dipped, as it were, and essentially imbued, through the
potency of my art, with the fluid medium of spirits.
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