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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of The House of Mystery, by William Henry Irwin
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: The House of Mystery
+       An Episode in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant An Episode
+       in the Career of Rosalie Le Grange, Clairvoyant
+
+
+Author: William Henry Irwin
+
+Release Date: June 22, 2004 [EBook #12678]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by Kevin O'Hare, Beth Trapaga and the Online Distributed
+Proofreading Team.
+
+
+
+
+
+[Illustration: ROSALIE LE GRANGE]
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY
+
+AN EPISODE IN THE CAREER OF ROSALIE LE GRANGE, CLAIRVOYANT
+
+
+By WILL IRWIN
+
+
+Illustrated by Frederick C. Yohn
+
+
+
+
+1910
+
+
+
+
+CONTENTS
+
+   I. The Unknown Girl
+
+  II. Mr. Norcross Wastes Time
+
+ III. The Light
+
+  IV. His First Call
+
+   V. The Light Wavers
+
+  VI. Enter Rosalie Le Grange
+
+ VII. Rosalie's First Report
+
+VIII. The Fish Nibbles
+
+  XI. Rosalie's Second Report
+
+   X. The Streams Converge
+
+  XI. Through the Wall-Paper
+
+ XII. Annette Lies
+
+XIII. Annette Tells the Truth
+
+ XIV. Mainly from the Papers
+
+
+
+LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS
+
+Rosalie le Grange
+
+Annette
+
+"It wasn't the money; it was the game--"
+
+He had taken an impression of mental power as startling as a sudden
+blow in the face
+
+"Then it's as good as done"
+
+Norcross's breath came a little faster
+
+"I was looking straight down on the back parlors"
+
+"Stay where you are," he commanded
+
+
+
+THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+THE UNKNOWN GIRL
+
+
+In a Boston and Albany parlor-car, east bound through the Berkshires,
+sat a young man respectfully, but intently studying a young woman. Now
+and then, from the newspapers heaped in mannish confusion about his
+chair, he selected another sheet. Always, he took advantage of this
+opportunity to face the chair across the aisle and to sweep a glance
+over a piquant little profile, intent on a sober-looking book. Again,
+he would gaze out of the window; and he gazed oftenest when a freight
+train hid the beauties of outside nature. The dun sides of freight cars
+make out of a window a passable mirror. Twice, in those dim and
+confused glimpses, he caught just a flicker of her eye across her book,
+as though, she, on her part, were studying him.
+
+It was her back hair which had first entangled Dr. Blake's thoughts; it
+was the graceful nape of her neck which had served to hold them fast.
+When the hair and the neck below dawned on him, he identified her as
+that blonde girl whom he had noted at the train gate, waving farewell
+to some receding friend--and noted with approval. As a traveler on many
+seas and much land, he knew the lonely longing to address the woman in
+the next seat. He knew also, as all seasoned travelers in America know,
+that such desire is sometimes gratified, and without any surrender of
+decency, in the frank and easy West--but never east of Chicago. This
+girl, however, exercised somehow, a special pull upon his attention and
+his imagination. And he found himself playing a game by which he had
+mitigated many a journey of old. He divided his personality into two
+parts--man and physician--and tried, by each separate power, to find as
+much as he could from surface indications about this travel-mate of
+his.
+
+Mr. Walter Huntington Blake perceived, besides the hair like dripping
+honey, deep blue eyes--the blue not of a turquoise but of a
+sapphire--and an oval face a little too narrow in the jaw, so that the
+chin pointed a delicate Gothic arch. He noted a good forehead, which
+inclined him to the belief that she "did" something--some subtle
+addition which he could not formulate confirmed that observation. He
+saw that her hands were long and tipped with nails no larger than a
+grain of maize, that when they rested for a moment on her face, in the
+shifting attitudes of her reading, they fell as gently as flower-stalks
+swaying together in a breeze. He saw that her shoulders had a slight
+slope, which combined with hands and eyes to express a being all
+feminine--the kind made for a lodestone to a man who has known the hard
+spots of the world, like Mr. Walter Huntington Blake.
+
+"A pippin!" pronounced Mr. Blake, the man.
+
+Dr. Blake, the physician, on the other hand, caught a certain languor
+in her movements, a physical tenuity which, in a patient, he would have
+considered diagnostic. So transparent was her skin that when her
+profile dipped forward across a bar of sunshine the light shone through
+the bridge of her nose--a little observation charming to Blake, the
+man, but a guide to Blake, the physician. She had the look, Dr. Blake
+told himself, which old-fashioned country nurses of the herb-doctor
+school refer to as "called." He knew that, in about one case out of
+three, that look does in fact amount to a real "call"--the outward
+expression of an obscure disease.
+
+"Her heart?" queried Blake, the physician. The transparent, porcelain
+quality of her skin would indicate that. But he found, as he watched,
+no nervous twitching, no look as of an incipient sack under her eyes;
+nor did the transparent quality seem waxy. There was, too, a certain
+pinkness in the porcelain which showed that her blood ran red and pure.
+
+Then Mr. Blake and Dr. Blake re-fused into one psychology and decided
+that her appearance of delicacy was subtly psychological. It haunted
+him with an irritating effect of familiarity--as of a symptom which he
+ought to recognize. In all ways was it intertwined with the expression
+of her mouth. She had never smiled enough; therein lay all the trouble.
+She presented a very pretty problem to his imagination. Here she was,
+still so very young that little was written on her face, yet the
+little, something unusual, baffling. The mouth, too tightly set, too
+drooping--that expressed it all. To educate such a one in the ways of
+innocent frivolity!
+
+When the porter's "last call for luncheon" brought that flutter of
+satisfaction by which a bored parlor-car welcomes even such a trivial
+diversion as food, Dr. Blake waited a fair interval for her toilet
+preparations, and followed toward the dining-car. He smiled a little at
+himself as he realized that he was craftily scheming to find a seat, if
+not opposite her, at least within seeing distance. On a long and lonely
+day-journey, he told himself, travelers are like invalids--the smallest
+incident rolls up into a mountain of adventure. Here he was, playing
+for sight of an interesting girl, as another traveler timed the
+train-speed by the mile-posts, or counted the telegraph poles along the
+way.
+
+So he came out suddenly into the Pullman car ahead--and almost stumbled
+over the nucleus of his meditations. She was half-kneeling beside a
+seat, clasping in her arms the figure of a little, old woman. He
+hesitated, stock still. The blonde girl shifted her position as though
+to take better hold of her burden, and glanced backward with a look of
+appeal. The doctor came forward on that; and his sight caught the face
+of the old woman. Her eyes were closed, her head had dropped to one
+side and lay supine upon the girl's shoulder. It appeared to be a plain
+case of faint.
+
+[Illustration: ANNETTE]
+
+"I am a physician," he said simply, "Get the porter, will you?" Without
+an instant's question or hesitation, the girl permitted him to relieve
+her, and turned to the front of the car. Other women and one fussy,
+noisy man were coming up now. Dr. Blake waved them aside. "We need air
+most of all--open that window, will you?" The girl was back with the
+porter. "Is the compartment occupied? Then open it. We must put her on
+her back." The porter fumbled for his keys. Dr. Blake gathered up the
+little old woman in his arms, and spoke over his shoulder to the blonde
+girl:
+
+"You will come with us?" She nodded. Somehow, he felt that he would
+have picked her from the whole car to assist in this emergency. She was
+like one of those born trained nurses who ask no questions, need no
+special directions, and are as reliable as one's instruments.
+
+The old woman was stirring by the time he laid her out on the sofa of
+the compartment. He wet a towel in the pitcher at the washstand, wrung
+it out, pressed it on her forehead. It needed no more than that to
+bring her round.
+
+"Only a faint," said Dr. Blake; "the day's hot and she's not accustomed
+to train travel, I suppose. Is she--does she belong to your party?"
+
+The girl spoke for the first time in his hearing. Even before he seized
+the meaning of her speech, he noted with a thrill the manner of it.
+Such a physique as this should go with the high, silvery tone of a
+flute; so one always imagines it. This girl spoke in the voice of a
+violin--soft, deep, deliciously resonant. In his mind flashed a picture
+for which he was a long time accounting--last winter's ballet of the
+New York Hippodrome. Afterward, he found the key to that train of
+thought. It, had been a ballet of light, shimmering colors, until
+suddenly a troop of birds in royal purple had slashed their way down
+the center of the stage. They brought the same glorified thrill of
+contrast as this soft but strong contralto voice proceeding from that
+delicate blondness.
+
+"Oh, no!" she said, "I never saw her before. She was swaying as I came
+down the aisle, and I caught her. She's--she's awake." The old woman
+had stirred again.
+
+"Get my bag from seat 12, parlor-car," said Dr. Blake to the porter.
+"Tell them outside that it is a simple fainting-spell and we shall need
+no assistance." Now his charity patient had recovered voice; she was
+moaning and whimpering. The girl, obeying again Dr. Blake's unspoken
+thought, took a quick step toward the door. He understood without
+further word from her.
+
+"All right," he said; "she may want to discuss symptoms. You're on the
+way to the dining-car aren't you? I'll be along in five minutes, and
+I'll let you know how she is. Tell them outside that it is nothing
+serious and have the porter stand by--please." That last word of
+politeness came out on an afterthought--he had been addressing her in
+the capacity of a trained nurse. He recognized this with confusion, and
+he apologized by a smile which illuminated his rather heavy, dark face.
+She answered with the ghost of a smile--it moved her eyes rather than
+her mouth--and the door closed.
+
+After five minutes of perfunctory examination and courteous attention
+to symptoms, he tore himself away from his patient upon the pretext
+that she needed quiet. He wasted three more golden minutes in assuring
+his fellow passengers that it was nothing. He escaped to the dining
+car, to find that the delay had favored him. Her honey-colored back
+hair gleamed from one of the narrow tables to left of the aisle. The
+unconsidered man opposite her had just laid a bill on the waiter's
+check, and dipped his hands in the fingerbowl. Dr. Blake invented a
+short colloquy with the conductor and slipped up just as the waiter
+returned with the change. He bent over the girl.
+
+"I have to report," said he, "that the patient is doing nicely; doctor
+and nurse are both discharged!"
+
+She returned a grave smile and answered conventionally, "I am very
+glad."
+
+At that precise moment, the man across the table, as though recognizing
+friendship or familiarity between these two, pocketed his change and
+rose. Feeling that he was doing the thing awkwardly, that he would give
+a year for a light word to cover up his boldness, Dr. Blake took the
+seat. He looked slowly up as he settled himself, and he could feel the
+heat of a blush on his temples. He perceived--and for a moment it did
+not reassure him--that she on her part neither blushed nor bristled.
+Her skin kept its transparent whiteness, and her eyes looked into his
+with intent gravity. Indeed, he felt through her whole attitude the
+perfect frankness of good breeding--a frankness which discouraged
+familiarity while accepting with human simplicity an accidental contact
+of the highway. She was the better gentleman of the two. His renewed
+confusion set him to talking fast.
+
+"If it weren't that you failed to come in with any superfluous advice,
+I should say that you had been a nurse--you seem to have the instinct.
+You take hold, somehow, and make no fuss."
+
+"Why should I?" she asked, "with a doctor at hand? I was thinking all
+the time how you lean on a doctor. I should never have known what to
+do. How is she? What was the matter?"
+
+"She's resting. It isn't every elderly lady who can get a compartment
+from the Pullman Company for the price of a seat. She was put on at
+Albany by one set of grandchildren and she's to be taken off at
+Boston by another set. And she's old and her heart's a little
+sluggish--self-sacrifice goes downward not upward, through the
+generations, I observe--though I'm a young physician at that!"
+
+Her next words, simply spoken as they were, threw him again into
+confusion.
+
+"I don't know your name, I think--mine is Annette Markham."
+
+Dr. Blake drew out a card.
+
+"Dr. W.H. Blake, sometime contract surgeon to the Philippine Army of
+Occupation," he supplemented, "now looking for a practice in these
+United States!"
+
+"The Philippines--oh, you've been in the East? When we were in the
+Orient, I used to hear of them ever so dimly--I didn't think we'd all
+be talking of them so soon--"
+
+"Oh, you've been in the Orient--do you know the China Coast--and Nikko
+and--"
+
+"No, only India."
+
+"I've never been there--and I've heard it's the kernel of the East," he
+said with his lips. But his mind was puzzling something out and finding
+a solution. The accent of that deep, resonant voice was neither Eastern
+nor Western, Yankee nor Southern--nor yet quite British. It was rather
+cosmopolitan--he had dimly placed her as a Californienne. Perhaps this
+fragment explained it. She must be a daughter of the English official
+class, reared in America. The theory would explain her complexion and
+her simple, natural balance between frankness and reserve. He formed
+that conclusion, but, "How do you like America after India?" was all he
+said.
+
+"How do you like it after the Philippines?" she responded.
+
+"That is a Yankee trick--answering one question with another," he said,
+still following his line of conjecture; "it was invented by the
+original Yankee philosopher, a person named Socrates. I like it after
+everything--I'm an American. I'm one of those rare birds in the Eastern
+United States, a native of New York City."
+
+"Well, then,"--her manner had, for the first time, the brightness which
+goes with youth, plus the romantic adventure--"I like it not only after
+anything but before anything--I'm an American, too."
+
+A sense of irritation rose in him. He had let conjecture grow to
+conclusion in the most reckless fashion. And why should he care so much
+that he had risked offending a mere passing acquaintance of the road?
+
+"Somehow, I had taken it for granted--your reference to India I
+suppose--that you were English."
+
+"Oh, no! Though an English governess made me fond of the English. I'm
+another of the rare birds. I was hardly out of New York in my life
+until five years ago, when my aunt took me for a stay of two years in
+the Orient--in India at least. I've been very happy to be back."
+
+The current of talk drifted then from the coast of confidences to the
+open sea of general conversation. He pulled himself up once or twice by
+the reflection that he was talking too much about himself. Once--and he
+remembered it with blushes afterward--he went so far as to say, "I
+didn't really need to be a doctor, any more than I needed to go to the
+Philippines--the family income takes care of that. But a man should do
+something." Nevertheless, she seemed disposed to encourage him in this
+course, seemed most to encourage him when he told his stories about the
+Philippine Army of Occupation.
+
+"Oh, tell me another!" she would cry. And once she said, "If there were
+a piano here, I venture you'd sing Mandelay." "That would I," he
+answered with a half sigh. And at last, when he was running down, she
+said, "Oh, please don't stop! It makes me crazy for the Orient!" "And
+me!" he confessed. Before luncheon was over, he had dragged out the two
+or three best stories in his wanderer's pack, and especially that one,
+which he saved for late firesides and the high moments of anecdotal
+exchange, about the charge at Caloocon. She drank down these tales of
+hike and jungle and firing-line like a seminary girl listening to her
+first grownup caller. For his part, youth and the need of male youth to
+spread its bright feathers before the female of its species, drove him
+on to more tales. He contrived his luncheon so that they finished and
+paid simultaneously--and in the middle of his story about Sergeant
+Jones, the dynamite and the pack mule. So, when they returned to the
+parlor-car, nothing was more simple, natural and necessary than that he
+should drop into the vacant chair beside her, and continue where he
+left off. He felt, when he had finished, the polite necessity of
+leading the talk back to her; besides, he had not finished his Study of
+the Unknown Girl. He returned, then, to the last thread which she had
+left hanging.
+
+"So you too are glad to be at home!" he said. "I'm so glad that I don't
+want to lose sight either of a skyscraper or of apple trees for years
+and years. I can't remember when I've ever wanted to stay in one place
+before."
+
+She laughed--the first full laugh he had heard from her. It was low and
+deep and bubbling, like water flowing from a long-necked bottle.
+
+"Just a moment ago, we were confessing that we were crazy for the
+Orient."
+
+"I'm glad to be caught in an inconsistency!" he answered. "I've been
+afraid, though, that this desire to roost in one place was a sign of
+incipient old age."
+
+She looked at him directly, and for a moment her fearless glance played
+over him, as in alarm.
+
+"Oh, I shouldn't be afraid of _that_," she said. "I don't know your
+age, of course, but if it will reassure you any, I'd put it at
+twenty-eight. And that, according to Peter Ibbertson, is quite the
+nicest age." Her face, with its unyouthful capacity for sudden
+seriousness, grew grave. Her deep blue eyes gazed past him out of the
+window.
+
+"I'm only twenty-four, but I know what it is to think that middle age
+is near--to dread it--especially when I half suspect I haven't spent
+the interest on my youth." She stopped.
+
+Dr. Blake held his very breath. His instincts warned him that she
+faltered at one of those instincts when confidence lies close to the
+lips. But she did not give it. Instead, she caught herself up with a
+perfunctory, "I suppose everyone feels that way at times."
+
+Although he wanted that confidence, he was clever enough not to reach
+for it at this point. Instead, he took a wide detour, and returned
+slowly, backing and filling to the point. But every time that he
+approached a closer intimacy, she veered away with an adroitness which
+was consummate art or consummate innocence. His first impression
+grew--that she "did" something. She had mentioned "Peter Ibbertson." He
+spoke, then, of books. She had read much, especially fiction; but she
+treated books as one who does not write. He talked art. Though she
+spoke with originality and understanding in response to his second-hand
+studio chatter, he could see that she neither painted nor associated
+much with those who did. Besides, her hands had none of the
+craftswoman's muscle. Of music--beyond ragtime--she knew as little as
+he. He invaded business--her ignorance was abysmal. The stage--she
+could count on her fingers the late plays which she had seen.
+
+When the trail had grown almost cold, there happened a little incident
+which put him on the scent again. He had thought suddenly of his
+patient in the compartment and made a visit, only to find her asleep.
+Upon his return he said:
+
+"You behaved like a soldier and a nurse toward her--a girl with such a
+distinct _flair_ for the game must have had longings to take up
+nursing--or perhaps you never read 'Sister Dora'?"
+
+"I did read 'Sister Dora,'" she answered, "and I was crazy about it."
+
+"Most girls are--hence the high death rate in hospitals," he
+interrupted.
+
+"But I gave that up--and a lot of other desires which all girls
+have--for something else. I had to." Her sapphirine eyes searched the
+Berkshire hills again, "Something bigger and nobler--something which
+meant the entire sacrifice of self."
+
+And here the brakeman called "Next station is Berkeley Center." Dr.
+Blake came to the sudden realization that they had reached his
+destination. She started, too.
+
+"Why, I get off here!" she exclaimed.
+
+"And so do I!" He almost laughed it out.
+
+"That's a coincidence."
+
+Dr. Blake refrained from calling her attention to the general flutter
+of the parlor-car and the industry of two porters. This being the
+high-tide time of the summer migration, and Berkeley Center being the
+popular resort on that line, nearly everyone was getting off. However
+as he delivered himself over to the porter, he nodded:
+
+"The climax of a series!"
+
+As they waited, bags in hand, "I am on my way to substitute for a month
+at the Hill Sanatorium," he said. "The assistant physician is going on
+a vacation--I suppose the ambulance will be waiting."
+
+"And I am going to the Mountain House--it's a little place and more the
+house of friends than an inn. If your work permits--"
+
+He interrupted with a boyish laugh.
+
+"Oh, it will!" But he said good-bye at the vestibule with a vague idea
+that she might have trouble explaining him to any very particular
+friends. He saw her mount an old-fashioned carry-all, saw her turn to
+wave a farewell. The carry-all disappeared. He started toward the Hill
+ambulance, but he was still thinking, "Now what is the thing which a
+girl like _that_ would consider more self-sacrificing than nursing?"
+
+
+
+
+II
+
+MR. NORCROSS WASTES TIME
+
+
+Robert H. Norcross looked up from a sheet of figures, and turned his
+vision upon the serrated spire of old Trinity Church, far below. Since
+his eyes began to fail, he had cultivated the salutary habit of resting
+them every half-hour or so. The action was merely mechanical; his mind
+still lingered on the gross earnings of the reorganized L.D. and M.
+railroad. It was a sultry afternoon in early fall. The roar of lower
+New York came up to him muffled by the haze. The traffic seemed to move
+more slowly than usual, as though that haze clogged its wheels and
+congealed its oils. The very tugs and barges, on the river beyond,
+partook of the season's languor. They crept over the oily waves at a
+sluggard pace, their smoke-streamers dropping wearily toward the water.
+
+The eyes of Robert H. Norcross swept this vista for the allotted two
+minutes of rest. Presently--and with the very slightest change of
+expression--they fixed themselves on a point so far below that he needs
+must lean forward and rest his arms on the window sill in order to
+look. He wasted thus a minute; and such a wasting, in the case of
+Robert H. Norcross, was a considerable matter. The Sunday
+newspapers--when in doubt--always played the income of Robert H.
+Norcross by periods of months, weeks, days, hours and minutes. Every
+minute of his time, their reliable statisticians computed, was worth a
+trifle less than forty-seven dollars. Regardless of the waste of time,
+he continued to gaze until the watch on his desk had ticked off five
+minutes, or two hundred and thirty-five dollars.
+
+The thing which had caught and held his attention was a point in the
+churchyard of old Trinity near to the south door.
+
+The Street had been remarking, for a year, that Norcross was growing
+old. The change did not show in his operations. His grip on the market
+was as firm as ever, his judgment as sure, his imagination as daring,
+his habit of keeping his own counsel as settled. Within that year, he
+had consummated the series of operations by which the L.D. and M.,
+final independent road needed by his system, had "come in"; within that
+year, he had closed the last finger of his grip on a whole principality
+of our domain. Every laborer in that area would thenceforth do a part
+of his day's delving, every merchant a part of his day's bargaining,
+for Robert H. Norcross. Thenceforth--until some other robber baron
+should wrest it from his hands--Norcross would make laws and unmake
+legislatures, dictate judgments and overrule appointments--give the
+high justice while courts and assemblies trifled with the middle and
+the low. Certainly the history of that year in American finance
+indicated no flagging in the powers of Robert H. Norcross.
+
+The change which the Street had marked lay in his face--it had taken on
+the subtle imprint of a first frosty day. He had never looked the power
+that he was. Short and slight of build, his head was rather small even
+for his size, and his features were insignificant--all except the
+mouth, whose wide firmness he covered by a drooping mustache, and the
+eyes, which betrayed always an inner fire. The trained observer of
+faces noticed this, however; every curve of his facial muscles, every
+plane of the inner bone-structure, was set by nature definitely and
+properly in its place to make a powerful and perfectly cooerdinated
+whole. In this facial manifestation of mental powers, he was like one
+of those little athletes who, carrying nothing superfluous, show the
+power, force and endurance which is in them by no masses of overlying
+muscles, but only by a masterful symmetry.
+
+Now, in a year, the change had come over his face--the jump as abrupt
+as that by which a young girl grows up--the transition from middle age
+to old age. It was not so much that his full, iron-gray hair and
+mustache had bleached and silvered. It was more that the cheeks were
+falling from middle-aged masses to old-age creases, more that the skin
+was drawing up, most that the inner energy which had vitalized his walk
+and gestures was his no longer.
+
+In the mind, too--though no one perceived that, he least of all--had
+come a change. Here and there, a cell had disintegrated and collapsed.
+They were not the cells which vitalized his business sense. They lay
+deeper down; it was as though their very disuse for thirty years had
+weakened them. In such a cell his consciousness dwelt while he gazed on
+Trinity Churchyard, and especially upon that modest shaft of granite,
+three graves from the south entrance. And the watch on his desk clicked
+off the valuable seconds, and the electric clock on the wall jumped to
+mark the passing minutes. "Click-click" from the desk--seventy-eight
+cents--"Click-click"--one dollar and fifty-seven cents--"Clack" from
+the wall--forty-seven dollars.
+
+Presently, when watch and clock had chronicled four hundred and seventy
+dollars of wasted time, he leaned back, looked for a moment on the
+brazen September heavens above, and sighed. He might then have turned
+back to his desk and the table of gross earnings, but for his
+secretary.
+
+"Mr. Bulger outside, sir," said the secretary.
+
+"All right!" responded Mr. Norcross. In him, those two words spoke
+enthusiasm; usually, a gesture or a nod was enough to bar or admit a
+visitor to the royal presence. Hard behind the secretary, entered with
+a bound and a breeze, Mr. Arthur Bulger. He was a tall man about
+forty-five if you studied him carefully, no more than thirty-five if
+you studied him casually. Not only his strong shoulders, his firm set
+on his feet, his well-conditioned skin, showed the ex-athlete who has
+kept up his athletics into middle age, but also that very breeze and
+bound of a man whose blood runs quick and orderly through its channels.
+His face, a little pudgy, took illumination from a pair of lively eyes.
+He was the jester in the court of King Norcross; one of the half-dozen
+men whom the bachelor lord of railroads admitted to intimacy. A
+measured intimacy it was; and it never trenched on business. Bulger,
+like all the rest, owed half of his position to the fact that he never
+asked by so much as a hint for tips, never seemed curious about the
+operations of Norcross. There was the time on Wall Street when
+Norcross, by a lift of his finger, a deflection of his eye, might have
+put his cousin and only known relative on the right side of the market.
+He withheld the sign, and his cousin lost. The survivors in Norcross's
+circle of friends understood this perfectly; it was why they survived.
+If they got any financial advantage from the friendship, it was through
+the advertising it gave. For example, Bulger, a broker of only moderate
+importance, owed something to the general understanding that he was
+"thick with the Old Man."
+
+Norcross looked up; his mustache lifted a little, and his eyes lit.
+
+"Drink?" he said. His allowance was two drinks a day; one just before
+he left the office, the other before dinner.
+
+"Much obliged," responded Bulger, "but you know where I was last night.
+If I took a drink now, I would emit a pale, blue flame."
+
+Norcross laughed a purring laugh, and touched a bell. The secretary
+stood in the door; Norcross indicated, by an out-turned hand, the top
+of his desk. The secretary had hardly disappeared before the office-boy
+entered with a tray and glasses. Simultaneously a clerk, entering from
+another door as though by accident, swept up the balance sheets of the
+L.D. and M. and bore them away. Bulger's glance followed the papers
+hungrily for a second; then turned back on Norcross, carefully mixing a
+Scotch highball.
+
+As Norcross finished with the siphon, his eyes wandered downward again.
+
+"Ever been about much down there?" he asked suddenly. Bulger crossed
+the room and looked down over his shoulder.
+
+"Where?" he asked, "The Street or--"
+
+"Trinity Churchyard."
+
+"Once I sang my little love lays there in the noon hour," answered
+Bulger. "I was a gallant clerk and hers the fairest fingers that ever
+caressed a typewriter--" The intent attitude of Norcross, the fact that
+he neither turned nor smiled, checked Bulger. With the instinct of the
+courtier, he perceived that the wind lay in another tack. He racked the
+unused half of his mind for appropriate sentiments.
+
+"Bully old graveyard," he brought out; "lot's of good people buried
+there."
+
+"Know any of the graves?"
+
+"Only Alexander Hamilton's. Everyone knows that."
+
+"That one--see--that marble shaft--not one of the old ones."
+
+"If you're curious to know," answered Bulger easily, "I'll find out on
+my way down to-morrow. I suppose if you were to go and look, and the
+reporters were to see you meditating among the tombs, we'd have a scare
+head to-morrow and a drop of ten points in the market." Bulger's shift
+to a slight levity was premeditated; he was taking guard against
+overplaying his part.
+
+"No, never mind," said Norcross, "it just recalls something." He paused
+the fraction of a second, and his eye grew dull. "Wonder if
+they're--anywhere--those people down under the tombstones?"
+
+"I suppose we all believe in immortality."
+
+"Seeing and hearing is believing. I believe what I see. Born that way."
+Norcross was speaking with a slight, agitated jerk in his voice. He
+rose now, and paced the floor, throwing out his feet in quick thrusts.
+"I'm getting along, Bulger, and I'd like to know." More pacing. Coming
+to the end of his route, he peered shrewdly into the face of the
+younger man. "Have you read the Psychical Society's report on Mrs.
+Fife?"
+
+Bulger's mind said, "Good God no!" His lips said, "Only some newspaper
+stuff about them. Seemed rather remarkable if true. Something in that
+stuff, I suppose."
+
+"I've read them," resumed Norcross. "Got the full set. We ought to
+inform ourselves on such things, Bulger. Especially when we get older.
+That gravestone now. There's one like it--that I know about." Norcross,
+with another jerky motion, which seemed to propel him against his will,
+crossed to his desk and touched a bell, bringing his secretary
+instantly.
+
+"Left hand side of the vault, box marked 'Private 3,'" he said. Then he
+resumed:
+
+"If they could come back they would come, Bulger. Especially those we
+loved. Not to let us see them, you understand, but to assure us it is
+all right--that we'll live again. That's what I want--proof--I can't
+take it on faith." His voice lowered. "Thirty years!" he whispered.
+"What's thirty years?"
+
+The secretary knocked, entered, set a small, steel box on the glass top
+of the desk. Norcross dismissed him with a gesture, drew out his keys,
+opened the box. It distilled a faint scent of old roses and old papers.
+Norcross looked within for a moment, as though turning the scent into
+memories, before he took out a locket. He opened it, hesitated, and
+then extended it to Bulger. It enclosed an exquisite miniature--a young
+woman, blonde, pretty in a blue-eyed, innocent way, but characterless,
+too--a face upon which life had left nothing, so that even the great
+painter who made the miniature from a photograph had illuminated it
+only with technical skill.
+
+"Don't tell me what you think of her," Norcross said quietly; "I prefer
+to keep my own ideas. It was when I was a young freight clerk. She
+taught school up there. We were--well, the ring's in the box, too. They
+took it off her finger when they buried her. That's why--" to put the
+brake on his rapidly running sentiment, he ventured one of his rare
+pleasantries at this point--"that's why I'm still a stock newspaper
+feature as one of the great matches for ambitious society girls."
+
+Bulger, listening, was observing also. Within the front cover of the
+case were two sets of initials in old English letters--"R.H.N." and
+"H.W." His mind, a little confused by its wanderings in strange fields,
+tried idly to match "H.W." with names. Suddenly he felt the necessity
+of expressing sympathy.
+
+"Poor--" he began, but Norcross, by a swift outward gesture of the
+hand, stopped and saved him.
+
+[Illustration: "IT WASN'T THE MONEY; IT WAS THE GAME--"]
+
+"Well, I got in after that," Norcross went on, "and I drove 'em! It
+wasn't the money; it was the game. She'd have had the spending of
+_that_. And it isn't just to see her--it's to know if she is still
+waiting--and if we'll make up for thirty years--out there."
+
+As Bulger handed back the locket, the secretary knocked again. Norcross
+started; something seemed to snap into place; he was again the silent,
+guarded baron of the railroads. He dropped the locket into the box,
+closed it. "The automobile," said his secretary. Norcross nodded, and
+indicated the box. The secretary bore it away.
+
+"Come up to dinner Tuesday," said Norcross in his normal tone. But his
+voice quavered a little for a moment as he added:
+
+"You're good at forgetting?"
+
+"Possessor of the best forgettery you ever saw," responded Bulger.
+Forthwith, they turned to speech of the railroad rate bill.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When, after a mufti dinner at the club, Bulger reached his bachelor
+apartments, he found a telegram. The envelope bore his office address;
+by that sign he knew, even before he unfolded the yellow paper, that it
+was the important telegram from his partner, the crucial telegram, for
+which he had been waiting these two days. It must have come to the
+office after he left. He got out the code book from his desk, laid it
+open beside the sheet, and began to decipher, his face whitening as he
+went on:
+
+    BUTTE, MONT.
+
+    Reports of expert phony. Think Oppendike salted it on him. They
+    will finish this vein in a month. Then the show will bust.
+    Federated Copper Company will not bite and too late now to unload
+    on public. Something must be done. Can't you use your drag with
+    Norcross somehow?
+
+    WATSON.
+
+Bulger, twisting the piece of yellow paper, stared out into the street.
+His "drag with Norcross!" What had that ever brought, what could it
+ever bring, except advertising and vague standing? Yet Norcross by a
+word, a wink, could give him information which, rightly used, would
+cancel all the losses of this unfortunate plunge in the Mongolia Mine.
+But Norcross would never give that word, that wink; and to fish for it
+were folly. Norcross never broke the rules of the lone game which he
+played.
+
+As Bulger stood there, immovable except for the nervous hands which
+still twisted and worried the telegram, he saw a sign on the building
+opposite. The first line, bearing the name, doubtless, was illegible;
+the second, fully legible, lingered for a long time merely in his
+perceptions before it reached and touched his consciousness.
+
+"CLAIRVOYANT," it read.
+
+He started, leaned on a table as though from weakness, and continued to
+stare at the sign.
+
+"Who is the cleverest fakir in that business?" he said at length to
+himself.
+
+And then, after a few intent minutes:
+
+"When he was a freight clerk--thirty years ago--that was at Farnham
+Mills--'H.W.'--granite shaft--sure it can be done!"
+
+
+
+
+III
+
+THE LIGHT
+
+
+As Dr. Blake tucked his racket under his arm and came down to the net,
+the breeze caught a corner of her veil and let the sunlight run clear
+across her face. He realized, in that moment, how the burning interest
+as a man, which he had developed in these three weeks for Annette
+Markham, had quite submerged his interest as a physician. For health,
+this was a different creature from the one whom he had studied in the
+parlor-car. Her color ran high; the greatest alarmist in the profession
+would have wasted no thought on her heart valves; the look as of one
+"called" had passed. Though she still appeared a little grave, it was a
+healthy, attractive gravity; and take it all in all she had smiled much
+during three weeks of daily walks and rides and tennis. Indeed, now
+that he remembered it, her tennis measured the gradual change. She
+would never be good at tennis; she had no inner strength and no "game
+sense." But at first she had played in a kind of stupor; again and
+again she would stand at the backline in a brown study until the
+passage of the ball woke her with an apologetic start. Now, she
+frolicked through the game with all vigor, zest and attention, going
+after every shot, smiling and sparkling over her good plays, prettily
+put out at her bad ones.
+
+While he helped her on with her sweater--lingering too long over that
+little service of courtesy--he expressed this.
+
+"Do you know that for physical condition you're no more the same girl
+whom I first met than--than I am!"
+
+She laughed a little at the comparison. "And you are no more the same
+man whom I first met--than I am!"
+
+He laughed too at this tribute to his summer coating of bronze over
+red. "I feel pretty fit," he admitted.
+
+"My summer always has that effect," she went on. "Do you know that for
+all I've been so much out of the active world"--a shadow fell on her
+eyes,--"I long for country and farms? How I wish I could live always
+out-of-doors! The day might come--" the shadow lifted a little--"when
+I'd retire to a farm for good."
+
+"You've one of those constitutions which require air and light and
+sunshine," he answered.
+
+"You're quite right. I actually bleach in the shadow--like lettuce.
+That's why Aunt Paula always sends me away for a month every now and
+then to the quietest place proper for a well-brought-up young person."
+
+His eyes shadowed as though they had caught that blasting shade in
+hers. From gossip about the Mountain House, later from her own
+admission, he knew who "Aunt Paula" was--"a spirit medium, or
+something," said the gossip; "a great teacher of a new philosophy,"
+said Annette Markham.
+
+Dr. Blake, partly because adventure had kept him over-young, held still
+his basic, youthful ideas about the proper environment for woman.
+Whenever the name "Aunt Paula," softened with the accents of affection,
+proceeded from that low, contralto voice, it hurt the new thing,
+greater than any conventional idea, which was growing up in him. He
+even suspected, at such times, what might be the "something nobler than
+nursing."
+
+A big apple tree shaded the sidelines of the Mountain House tennis
+court. A bench fringed its trunk. Annette threw herself down, back
+against the bark. It was late afternoon. The other house-guests droned
+over bridge on the piazzas or walked in the far woods; they were alone
+out-of-doors. And Annette, always, until now, so chary of confidences,
+developed the true patient's weakness and began to talk symptoms.
+
+"It is curious the state I'm in before Aunt Paula sends me away," she
+said; "I was a nervous child, and though I've outgrown it, I still have
+attacks of nerve fag or something like it. I can feel them coming on
+and so can she. You know we've been together so much that it's
+like--like two bees in adjoining cells. The cell-wall has worn thin; we
+can almost touch. She knows it often before I do. She makes me go to
+bed early; often she puts me to sleep holding my hand, as she used to
+do when I was a little girl. But even sleep doesn't much help. I come
+out of it with a kind of fright and heaviness. I have little memories
+of curious dreams and a queer sense, too, that I mustn't remember what
+I've dreamed. I grow tired and heavy--I can always see it in my face.
+Then Aunt Paula sends me away, and I become all right again--as I am
+now."
+
+Blake did not express the impatient thought of his mind. He only said:
+
+"A little sluggishness of the blood and a little congestion of the
+brain. I had such sleep once after I'd done too much work and fought
+too much heat in the Cavite Hospital. Only with me it took the form of
+nightmare--mostly, I was in process of being boloed."
+
+"Yes, perhaps it was that"--her eyes deepened to their most faraway
+blue--"and perhaps it is something else. I think it may be. Aunt Paula
+thinks so, too, though she never says it."
+
+What was the something? Did she stand again on the edge of revelation?
+Events had gone past the time when he could wait patiently for her
+confidence, could approach it through tact. It was the moment not for
+snipping but for bold charging. And his blood ran hot.
+
+"This something--won't you tell me what it is? Why are you always so
+mysterious with me? Why--when I want to know everything about you?"
+After he had said this, he knew that there was no going backward.
+Doubts, fears, terrors of conventionalities, awe of his conservative,
+blood-proud mother in Paris--all flew to the winds.
+
+Perhaps she caught something of this in his face, for she drew away a
+trifle and said:
+
+"I might have told you long ago, but I wasn't sure of your sympathy."
+
+"I want you to be sure of my sympathy in all things."
+
+"Ah, but your mind is between!" That phrase brought a shock to Dr.
+Blake. At the only spiritualistic seance he had ever attended, a greasy
+affair in a hall bedroom, he had heard that very phrase. A picture of
+this woman, so clean and windblown of mind and soul, caught like a
+trapped fly in the web of the unclean and corrupt--it was that which
+quite whirled him off his feet.
+
+"Between our hearts then, between our hearts!" he cried. "Oh, Annette,
+I love you!" His voice came out of him low and distinct, but all the
+power in the world vibrated behind it. "I have loved you always. You've
+been with me everywhere I went, because I was looking for you. I've
+seen a part of you in the best of every woman"--he pulled himself up,
+for neither by look nor gesture did she respond--"I've no right to be
+saying this--"
+
+"If you have not," she answered, and a delicate blush ran over her
+skin, "no other man has!" She said it simply, but with a curious kind
+of pride.
+
+He would have taken her hand on this, but the grave, direct gaze of her
+sapphirine eyes restrained him. It was not the look of a woman who
+gives herself, but rather that of a woman who grieves for the
+ungivable.
+
+"Ah," she said, "if anyone's to blame, it is I. I've brought it on
+myself! I've been weak--weak!"
+
+"No," he said, "I brought it on--God brought it on--but what does that
+matter?
+
+"It's _here_. I can no more fight it than I can fight the sea."
+
+Now her head dropped forward and her hands, with that gracefully
+uncertain motion which was like flower-stalks swayed by a breeze, had
+covered her face.
+
+"I can't speak if I look at you," she said, "and I must before you go
+further--I must tell you all about myself so that you will understand."
+
+The confidence, long sought, was coming, he thought; and he thought
+also how little he cared for it now that he was pursuing a greater
+thing.
+
+"You know so little about me that I must begin far back--you don't even
+know about my aunt--"
+
+"I know something--what you've said, what Mrs. Cole at the Mountain
+House told me. She's Mrs. Paula Markham--" his mind went on, "the great
+fakir of the spook doctors," but his lips stifled the phrase and said
+after a pause, "the great medium."
+
+"I don't like to hear her called that," said Annette. "In spite of what
+I'm going to tell you, I never saw but once the thing they call a
+medium. That was years ago--but the horrible sacrilege of it has never
+left me. She had a part of truth, and she was desecrating it by guesses
+and catch words--selling it for money! Aunt Paula is broader than I.
+'It's part of the truth,' she said, 'that woman is desecrating the
+work, but she's serving in her way.' I suppose so--but since then I've
+never liked to hear Aunt Paula called a medium."
+
+She paused a second on this.
+
+"If I were only sure of your sympathy!" A note of pleading fluttered in
+her voice.
+
+"No thought of yours, however I regard it, but is sure of my
+sympathy--because it's yours," he answered.
+
+As though she had not heard, she went on.
+
+"I was an orphan. I never knew my father and mother. The first things I
+remember are of the country--perhaps that is why I love the
+out-of-doors--the sky through my window, filled with huge, puffy,
+ice-cream clouds, a little new-born pig that somebody put in my bed one
+morning--daisy-fields like snow--and the darling peep-peep-peep of
+little bunches of yellow down that I was always trying to catch and
+never succeeding. I couldn't say _chicken_. I always said _shicken_"
+She paused. With that tenderness which every woman entertains for her
+own little girlhood, she smiled.
+
+"I've told you of the five white birches. I was looking at them and
+naming them on my fingers the day that Aunt Paula came. My childhood
+ended there. I seemed to grow up all at once."
+
+Blake muttered something inarticulate. But at her look of inquiry, he
+merely said. "Go on!"
+
+"She isn't really my aunt by blood,--Aunt Paula isn't. You
+understand--my father and her husband were brothers. They all
+died--everybody died but just Aunt Paula and me. So she took me away
+with her. And after that it was always the dreadful noise and confusion
+of New York, with only my one doll--black Dinah--a rag-baby. I
+thought," she interrupted herself wistfully, "I'd send Dinah to you
+when I got back to New York. Would you like her?"
+
+"Like her--like her! My--my--" But he swallowed his words. "Go on!" He
+commanded again.
+
+"Afterwards came London and then India. Such education as I had, I got
+from governesses. I didn't have very much as girls go in my--in my
+class. I didn't understand that then, any more than I understand why I
+wasn't allowed to go to school or to play with other girls. There was a
+time when I rebelled frightfully at that. I can tell definitely just
+when it began. We were passing a convent in the Bronx, and it was
+recess time. The sisters in their starched caps were sewing over by the
+fence, and the girls were playing--a ring game, 'Go in and out the
+window'--I can hear it now. I crowded my little face against the
+pickets to watch, and two little girls who weren't in the game passed
+close to me. The nearest one--I 'm sure I'd know her now if I saw her
+grown up. She was of about my own age, very dark, with the silkiest
+black hair and the longest black eyelashes that I ever saw. She had a
+dimple at one corner of her mouth. She wore on her arm a little
+bracelet with a gold heart dangling from it. I wasn't allowed any
+jewelry; and it came into my mind that I'd like a gold bracelet like
+that, before it came that I'd like such a friend for my very ownest and
+dearest. The other girl, a red-haired minx who walked with her arm
+about _my_ girl's waist--how jealous I was of her! I watched until Aunt
+Paula dragged me away. As I went, I shouted over my shoulder, 'Hello,
+little girl!' The little dark girl saw me, and shouted back, 'Hello!'
+Dear little thing. I hope she's grown up safe and very happy! She'll
+never know what she meant to me!"
+
+Her lips quivered again. Looking up into her face, Blake wondered for
+an instant at the sudden softness of her eyes. Then he realized that
+they were slowly filling with tears. He reached again to seize her
+hands.
+
+"Oh, no, no--wait!" she said, weakly. After a pause, she resumed:
+
+"That got up rebellion in me. All children have such periods, I've
+heard. I'm docile enough now. But before I was through with this one,
+Aunt Paula had to make my destiny clear to me--long before she meant to
+do so. And I grew to be resigned, and then glad, because it was a
+greater thing."
+
+Here a rapid, inexplicable change crossed her face. From its firmness
+of health and strength, it fell toward the look of one "called"--
+
+"I must go back again. Between Aunt Paula and me there was always a
+great sympathy. It's hard to describe. Often we do not have to speak
+even of the most important things. When I come to know more about other
+people, I wondered at first why they needed to do so much talking.
+Things have happened--things that I would not expect you to believe--"
+
+She had kindled now, and she looked into his eyes like some sybil,
+divinely unconscious, preaching the unbelievable.
+
+"I knew dimly, as a child knows, and accepts, that Aunt Paula had some
+wonderful mission and that it had to do with the other world--all
+you're taught when they teach you to say your prayers. Little by little
+she made me understand. I grew up before I understood fully. The
+Guides--Aunt Paula's--I have none as yet--had told her that I was a
+Light."
+
+He caught at this word, for his lover's impatience was burning and
+beating within him.
+
+"Light!" he said; "my Light!"
+
+She regarded him gravely, and then, as though his fervor had frightened
+her, she looked beyond at the apple leaves.
+
+"Don't--you'll know soon why you mustn't. Oh, help me, for I am
+unhappy!" She controlled a little upward ripple of her throat. "She,
+the Guides say, is a great Light, but I am to be a greater. They sent
+her to find me, and they directed her to keep me as she has--away from
+the world. When she first told me that, I was terrified. She had to sit
+beside me and hold my hand until I went to sleep. It's wonderful how
+quickly I do sleep when Aunt Paula's with me--she's the most soothing
+person in the world. If it weren't for her, I don't know what I'd do
+when I get into my tired times."
+
+"You're never going to have any more tired times, Light," he said.
+
+She went on inflexibly, but he knew that she had heard:
+
+"There was one thing which I did not understand, and neither perhaps
+did Aunt Paula. The Guides sometimes seem foolish, but in the end
+they're always wise; I suppose they waited until the time should come.
+Though I tried to help it along, though I cried with impatience, I
+couldn't begin to get voices. I've sat in dark rooms for hours, as Aunt
+Paula wished me to do. I've felt many true things, but I could never
+say honestly that I heard anything. But the Guides told Aunt Paula
+'wait.' And at last she learned what was the matter.
+
+"I don't know quite how to tell you this next. It came on the way back
+from India. She had gone there--but perhaps you won't be interested to
+know why she went. Though I was more than twenty, I'd never had what
+you might call a flirtation. I'd been kept by the Guides away from
+men--as I'd once been kept from other children. There was a young
+Englishman on the steamer. And I liked him."
+
+Blake gave a sudden start, and rose automatically. So this confidence
+led to another man--that was the obstacle! She seemed to catch his
+thought.
+
+"Oh, not that!" she cried; "he was only an incident--won't you hear
+me?" Blake dropped at her feet again.
+
+"But I liked him, though never any more--he was a friend and girls need
+to play. But he wanted to be more than a friend. Aunt Paula passed us
+on the deck one evening. After I had gone to bed, she came into my
+stateroom. When the power is in her, I know it--and I never saw it so
+strong as that night. It shone out of her. But that wasn't the strange
+thing. Only twice before, had I heard the voices speak from her
+mouth--mostly, she used to tell me what they said to her. But it was
+not Aunt Paula talking then--it was Martha, her first and best control.
+Shall I tell you all she said?"
+
+Out of the confused impulses running through Dr. Blake, his sense of
+humor spurted a moment to the fore. He found himself struggling to keep
+back a smile at the picture of some fat old woman in a dressing gown
+simulating hysteria that she might ruin a love affair. He was hard put
+to make his voice sound sincere, as he answered:
+
+"Yes, all."
+
+"She said: 'Child, you are more influenced by this man than you know.
+It is not the great love, but it is dangerous. You are to be the great
+Light only after you have put aside a great earthly love. This vessel
+from which I am speaking'--she meant Aunt Paula of course--'yielded to
+an earthly love. That is why she is less than you will be. Would you
+imperil truth?' It was something like that, only more. Ah, do you see
+now?"
+
+"I see," said his sense of humor, "that your Aunt Paula is a most
+unlimited fakir."
+
+"I see," said his voice, "but do you _believe_ it?"
+
+"I've so much cause to believe that I can never tell you all. After
+Aunt Paula came out of it, I told her what Martha had said. She was
+dear and sympathetic. She put me to sleep; and when I woke, I was
+resigned. I did not see him alone again. Now I understand more clearly.
+When I have had that earthly love and put it aside, when I have
+_proved_ myself to my Guides--then the voices will come to me. Martha
+has repeated it to Aunt Paula whenever I have gone away from home. She
+repeated it before I came up here--"
+
+"They had cause to repeat it," he took her up fiercely; "cause to
+repeat it!"
+
+"I--I'm afraid so. But how should I know? I looked at you--and it
+seemed right, everlastingly right, that I should know you. And then I
+did--so suddenly and easily that it made me shudder afterwards for fear
+the test had come--the agony which I have been afraid to face. Ah, it's
+bold saying this!" She drooped forward, and her porcelain skin turned
+to rose.
+
+Blake sat breathless, dumb. Never had she seemed so far away from him
+as then; never had she seemed so desirable. He struggled with his
+voice, but no word came; and it was she who spoke first.
+
+"Now I know--it is the agony!"
+
+At this admission, all the love and all the irritation in him came up
+together into a force which drove him on. They were alone; none other
+looked; but had all the world been looking, he might have done what he
+did. He rose to his feet, he dropped both his hands on her shoulders,
+he devoured her sapphirine eyes with his eyes, and his voice was steel
+as he spoke:
+
+"You love me. You have always loved me. In spite of everything, you
+will marry me! You will say it before you are done with me!"
+
+He stopped suddenly, for her eyelids were drooping. Had he not been a
+physician, he would have said that she was going to faint. But her
+color did not change. And suddenly she was speaking in a low tone which
+mocked his, but with no expression nor intonations:
+
+"I love you. I have always loved you. In spite of everything, I shall
+marry you."
+
+He dropped his hands from her shoulders with a bewildered impulse to
+seize her in his arms; then the publicity of the place came to him, and
+he drew his hands back. On that motion, her eyes opened and she flashed
+a little away from him.
+
+"What did I say?" she exclaimed; "and why--oh, don't touch me--don't
+come near--can't you see it makes it harder for me to renounce?"
+
+"But you said--"
+
+"I said before you touched me--ah, don't touch me again--that I
+_should_ make it hard--the harder I make it, the more I shall grow--but
+I can't bear so much!" She had risen, was moving away.
+
+"Let's walk," he said shortly; and then, "Even if you put me aside,
+won't you keep me in your life?"
+
+"The Guides will tell me," she answered simply.
+
+"But I may see you--call on you in the city?"
+
+"Unless the Guides forbid."
+
+They were walking side by side now; they had turned from the sunken
+arena, which surrounded the tennis court, toward the house. Blake saw
+that the driver of the Mountain House stage was approaching. He waved a
+yellow envelope as he came on:
+
+"Been looking for you, Miss Markham. Telegram. Charges paid."
+
+Dr. Blake stepped away as Annette, in the preliminary flutter of fear
+with which a woman always receives a telegram, tore open the envelope
+and read the enclosure. Without a word, she handed it over to him. It
+read:
+
+    ANNETTE MARKHAM:
+
+    Take next train home. Advice of Martha. Wire arrival.
+
+    PAULA MARKHAM.
+
+"Perhaps the Guides know," she said, smiling but quivering, too.
+"Perhaps they're going to make it easier for me."
+
+
+
+
+IV
+
+HIS FIRST CALL
+
+
+    Dear Mr. Blake (read the letter): It was nice to get your note and
+    to know that you are back in town so soon. Of course you must come
+    to see me. I want Aunt Paula to know that all the complimentary
+    things I have said about you are true. We are never at home in the
+    conventional sense--but I hope Wednesday evening will do.
+
+    Cordially,
+
+    ANNETTE MARKHAM.
+
+He had greeted this little note with all the private follies of lovers.
+Now for the hundredth time, he studied it for significances, signs,
+pretty intimacies; and he found positively nothing about it which he
+did not like. True, he failed to extract any important information
+from the name of the stationer, which he found under the flap of the
+envelope; but on the other hand the paper itself distinctly pleased
+him. It was note-size and of a thick, unfeminine quality. He approved
+of the writing--small, fine, legible, without trace of seminary
+affectation. And his spirits actually rose when he observed that it
+bore no coat-of-arms--not even a monogram.
+
+At last, with more flourishes of folly, he put the note away in his
+desk and inspected himself in the glass. To the credit of his modesty,
+he was thinking not of his white tie--fifth that he had ruined in the
+process of dressing--nor yet of the set of his coat. He was thinking
+of Mrs. Paula Markham and the impression which these gauds and graces
+might make upon her.
+
+"What do you suppose she's like?" he asked inaudibly of the correct
+vision in the glass.
+
+He had exhausted all the possibilities--a fat, pretentious medium whom
+Annette's mind transformed by the alchemy of old affection into a
+presentable personage; a masculine and severe old woman with the
+"spook" look in her eyes; a fluttering, affected _precieuse_,
+concealing her quackery by chatter. Gradually as he thought on her, the
+second of these hypotheses came to govern--he saw her as the severe and
+masculine type. This being so, what tack should she take?
+
+The correct vision in the glass vouchsafed no answer to this. His mood
+persisted as his taxicab whirled him into the region which borders the
+western edge of Central Park. The thing assumed the proportions of a
+great adventure. No old preparation for battle, no old packings to
+break into the unknown dark, had ever given him quite such a sense of
+the high, free airs where romance blows. He was going on a mere
+conventional call; but he was going also to high and thrilling
+possibilities.
+
+The house was like a thousand other houses of the prosperous middle
+class, distinguishable only by minor differences of doors and steps and
+area rails, from twenty others on the same block. He found himself
+making mystery even of this. Separate houses in New York require
+incomes.
+
+"Evidently it pays to deal in spooks," he said to himself.
+
+His first glimpse of the interior, his subsequent study of the
+drawing-room while the maid carried in his name, made more vivid this
+impression. The taste of the whole thing was evident; but the apartment
+had besides a special flavor. He searched for the elements which gave
+that impression. It was not the old walnut furniture, ample, huge,
+upholstered in a wine-colored velours which had faded just enough to
+take off the curse; it was not the three or four passable old
+paintings. The real cause came first to him upon the contemplation of a
+wonderful Buddhist priest-robe which adorned the wall just where the
+drawing-room met the curtains of the little rear alcove-library. The
+difference lay in the ornaments--Oriental, mostly East Indian and, all
+his experience told him, got by intimate association with the
+Orientals. That robe, that hanging lantern, those chased swords, that
+gem of a carved Buddha--they came not from the seaports nor from the
+shops for tourists. Whoever collected them knew the East and its
+peoples by intimate living. They appeared like presents, not
+purchases--unless they were loot.
+
+And now--his thumping heart flashed the signal--the delicate feminine
+flutter that meant Annette, was sounding in the hall. And now at the
+entrance stood Annette in a white dress, her neck showing a faint rim
+of tan above her girlish decolletage; Annette smiling rather formally
+as though this conventional passage after their unconventional meeting
+and acquaintance sat in embarrassment on her spirits; Annette saying in
+that vibrant boyish contralto which came always as a surprise out of
+her exquisite whiteness:
+
+"How do you do, Dr. Blake--you are back in the city rather earlier than
+you expected, aren't you?"
+
+He was conscious of shock, emotional and professional--emotional that
+they had not taken up their relation exactly where they left it
+off--professional because of her appearance. Not only was she pale and
+just a little drawn of facial line, but that indefinable look of one
+"called" was on her again.
+
+All this he gathered as he made voluble explanation--the attendance at
+the sanitorium had fallen off with the approach of autumn--they really
+needed no assistant to the resident physician--he thought it best to
+hurry his search for an opening in New York before the winter should
+set in. Then, put at his ease by his own volubility, and remembering
+that it is a lover's policy to hold the advantage gained at the last
+battle, he added:
+
+"And of course you may guess another reason."
+
+This she parried with a woman-of-the-world air, quite different from
+her old childlike frankness.
+
+"The theatrical season, I suppose. It opens earlier every year."
+
+He pursued that line no further. She took up the reins of the
+conversation and drove it along smooth but barren paths. "It's nice
+that you could come to-night. Looking for a practice must make so many
+calls on your time. I shouldn't have been surprised not to see you at
+all this winter. No one seems able to spare much time for acquaintances
+in New York."
+
+"Not at all," he said, ruffling a little within, "I shall find plenty
+of time for my _friends_ this winter." Deliberately he emphasized the
+word. "I hope nothing has happened to change our--friendship. Or does
+Berkeley Center seem primitive and far away?"
+
+For the first time that quality which he was calling in his mind her
+"society shell" seemed to melt away from her. She had kept her eyelids
+half closed; now they opened full.
+
+"I am living on the memory of it," she said.
+
+Here was his opening. A thousand incoherences rushed to his lips--and
+stopped there. For another change came over her. Those lids, like
+curtains drawn by stealth over what must not be revealed, sank half-way
+over her eyes. An impalpable stiffening ran over her figure. She became
+as a flower done in glass.
+
+Simultaneously, an uneasiness as definite as a shadow, fell across his
+spirit. He became conscious of a presence behind him. Involuntarily he
+turned.
+
+A woman was standing in the doorway leading to the hall.
+
+An instant she looked at Blake and an instant he looked at her. What
+she gained from her scrutiny showed in no change of expression. What he
+gained showed only in a quick flutter of the eyelids. He had, in fact,
+taken an impression of mental power as startling as a sudden blow in
+the face. She had a magnificent physique, preserved splendidly into the
+very heart of middle age; yet her foot had made no sound in her
+approach. Her black velvet draperies trailed heavy on the floor, yet
+they produced not the ghost of a rustle. Jet-black hair coiled in
+ropes, yet wisped white above the temples; light gray eyes, full and
+soft, yet with a steady look of power--all this came in the process of
+rising, of stepping forward to clasp a warm hand which lingered just
+long enough, in hearing Annette say in tones suddenly dead of their
+boyish energy:
+
+"Aunt Paula, let me introduce Dr. Blake." With one ample motion, Mrs.
+Markham seated herself. She turned her light eyes upon him. He had a
+subconscious impression of standing before two searchlights.
+
+"My niece has told me much about Dr. Blake," she said in a voice which,
+like Annette's, showed every intonation of culture; "I can't thank you
+enough for being kind to my little girl. So good in you to bother about
+her when"--Aunt Paula gave the effect of faltering, but her smile was
+peculiarly gracious--"when there were no other men nearer her own age."
+
+[Illustration: HE HAD TAKEN AN IMPRESSION OF MENTAL POWER AS STARTLING
+AS A SUDDEN BLOW IN THE FACE]
+
+Curiously, there floated into Blake's mind the remark which Annette
+made that first day on the train--"I should think you were about
+twenty-eight--and that, according to 'Peter Ibbertson,' is about the
+nicest age." Well, Annette at least regarded him as a contemporary! He
+found himself laughing with perfect composure--"Yes, that's the trouble
+with these quiet country towns. There never _are_ any interesting young
+men."
+
+"True," Mrs. Markham agreed, "although it makes slight difference in
+Annette's case. She is so little interested in men. It really worries
+me at times. But it's quite true, is it not so, dear?"
+
+Mrs. Markham had kept her remarkable eyes on Dr. Blake. And Annette, as
+though the conversation failed to interest her, had fallen into a
+position of extreme lassitude, her elbow on the table, her cheek
+resting on her hand.
+
+At her aunt's question, she seemed to rouse herself a little. "What is
+it that's quite true, Auntie?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Markham transferred her light-gray gaze to her niece's face. "I
+was saying," she repeated, speaking distinctly as one does for a child,
+"that you are very little interested in men."
+
+"It is perfectly true," Annette answered.
+
+Mrs. Markham laughed a purring laugh, strangely at variance with her
+size and type. "You'll find this an Adam-less Eden, Dr. Blake. I'll
+have to confess that I too am not especially interested in men."
+
+This thrust did not catch Dr. Blake unawares. He laughed a laugh which
+rang as true as Mrs. Markham's. He even ventured on a humorous
+monologue in which he accused his sex of every possible failing, ending
+with a triumphant eulogy of the other half of creation. But Mrs.
+Markham, though she listened with outward civility, appeared to take
+all his jibes seriously--miscomprehended him purposely, he thought.
+
+Whereupon, he turned to the lady's own affairs.
+
+"Miss Markham told me something about your stay in India. I've never
+been there yet. But of course no seasoned orientalist has any idea of
+dying without seeing India. I gathered from Miss Markham that you had
+some unusual experiences."
+
+"It's the dear child's enthusiasm," Mrs. Markham said. And it came to
+Blake at once that she was a little irritated. "I assure you we did not
+stir out of the conventional tourist route." Then came a few minutes
+about the beauties of the Taj by moonlight.
+
+Blake listened politely. "Your loot is all so interesting," he said,
+when she had finished. "Do tell me how you got it? Have you ever
+noticed what bully travelers' tales you get out of adventures in
+bargaining? Or better--looting? Those Johnnies who came out of Pekin--I
+mean the allied armies--tell some stories that are wonders."
+
+"That is true generally," Mrs. Markham agreed. "But I must confess that
+I did nothing more wonderful than to walk up to one of the bazaars and
+buy everything that I wanted."
+
+"That," Dr. Blake said mentally, "is a lie."
+
+Almost as if Annette had heard his thought--were answering it--she
+spoke for the first time with something of the old resiliency in her
+tone. "Auntie, do tell Dr. Blake about some of your adventures with
+those wonderful Yogis, and that fascinating rajah who was so kind to
+us."
+
+"The Yogis!" commented Dr. Blake to himself; "Ha, ha, and ho, ho! I bet
+you learned a bag of tricks there, madam."
+
+"Why, Annette, dear." Mrs. Markham laughed her purring laugh--that
+laugh could grow, Dr. Blake discovered, until it achieved a singularly
+unpleasant quality. "Your romantic ideas are running away with you.
+Whenever we arrived anywhere, of course, like anybody else, I called at
+Government House and the authorities there always put me in the way of
+seeing whatever sights the neighborhood afforded. I met one rajah in
+passing and visited one Yogi monastery. Do tell me about the
+Philippines!" Annette settled back into her appearance of weariness.
+
+Dr. Blake complied.
+
+He had intended to stay an hour at this first formal call. He had hoped
+to be led on, by gentle feminine wiles, to add another hour. He had
+even dreamed that Aunt Paula might be so impressed by him as to hold
+him until midnight. As a matter of fact, he left the house just
+thirty-five minutes after he entered. Just why he retreated so early in
+the engagement, he had only the vaguest idea. Even fresh from it as he
+was, he could not enumerate the small stings, the myriad minor goads,
+by which it became established in his mind that his call was not a
+success, that he was boring the two ladies whom he was trying so hard
+to entertain. At the end, it was a labored dialogue between him and
+Mrs. Markham. Again and again, he tried to drag Annette into the
+conversation. She was tongue-tied. The best she did was to give him the
+impression that, deep down in her tired psychology, she was trying to
+listen. As for Aunt Paula--if his gaze wandered from her to Annette and
+then back, he caught her stifling a yawn. Her final shot was to
+interrupt his best story a hair's breadth ahead of the point. When he
+said good-night, his manner--he flattered himself--betrayed nothing of
+his sense of defeat. But no fellow pedestrian, observing the savage
+vigor of his swift walk homeward, could have held any doubt as to his
+state of mind.
+
+
+
+
+V
+
+THE LIGHT WAVERS
+
+
+As Blake drove the runabout north through the fine autumn morning, he
+perceived suddenly that his subconscious mind was playing him a trick.
+He had started out to get light, air, easement of his soul among woods
+and fields. And now, instead of turning into Central Park at Columbus
+Circle, he was following Upper Broadway, where, in order to reach the
+great out-of-doors, he must dodge trucks and cabs between miles of
+hotels and apartment houses. In fact, he had been manoeuvering,
+half-unconsciously, so that he might turn into the park at the
+Eighty-Sixth Street entrance and so pass that most important of all
+dwellings in Manhattan, the house where Annette Markham lived. Any
+irritation which he had felt against her, after the unpleasant evening
+before, was lost in his greater irritation with her aunt. Annette
+appeared to him, now, as the prize, the reward, of a battle in which
+Mrs. Paula Markham was his antagonist.
+
+As he turned the corner into her street, ten years rolled away from
+him; he dreamed the childish, impossible dreams of a very youth. She
+might be coming down the steps as he passed. Fate might even send a
+drunkard or an obstreperous cabman for him to thrash in her service.
+But when he reached the house, nothing happened. The front door
+remained firmly shut; no open window gave a delicious glimpse of
+Annette. After his machine had gone ahead to such position that he
+could no longer scan the house without impolite craning of his neck, he
+found that his breath was coming fast. Awakened from his dream, a
+little ashamed of it, he opened the control and shot his machine ahead
+to the violation of all speed laws. He was crossing Central Park West,
+and the smooth opening of the park driveway was before him, when he
+looked up and saw--Annette.
+
+Her honey-colored hair, glistening dull in the autumn sunshine,
+identified her even before he caught her characteristic walk--graceful
+and fast enough, but a little languid, too. She was dressed in a plain
+tailor suit, a turban, low, heavy shoes.
+
+He slowed down the automobile to a crawl, that he might enter the park
+after her. A boyish embarrassment smote him; if he drove up and spoke
+to her, it would look premeditated. So he hesitated between two
+courses, knowing well which he would pursue in the end. As he entered
+the park, still a dozen yards behind her, he saw that the footpath
+which she was following branched out from the automobile drive. Within
+a few paces, she would disappear behind a hydrangea bush. On that
+perception, he gave all speed to his machine, shot alongside and
+stopped.
+
+Even before he reached her, she had turned and faced him. He fancied
+that the smile of recognition on her face had started even before she
+began to turn; she did not appear surprised, only pleased. Beating
+around in his mind for a graceful word of introduction, he accomplished
+an abrupt and ungraceful one.
+
+"Will you ride?" he asked.
+
+"With pleasure," she responded simply, and in one light motion she was
+in the seat beside him. He turned at low speed north, and as his hands
+moved over wheels and levers, she was asking:
+
+"How did you happen to be here?"
+
+He put a bold front on it.
+
+"I drove past your home, by instinct, because I was coming north. And I
+saw you. Which of your spirits"--he was bold enough for the moment to
+make light of her sacred places--"sent you out-of-doors just before I
+passed?"
+
+"The spirit of the night before," she answered, passing from smiles to
+gravity. "That long sleep without rest has been troubling me again. I
+remembered how exercise set me up in the country, and I started out for
+a little air. Aunt Paula is out this morning--something about the
+plumbing. Dear Auntie, how I'd love to take those cares off her
+shoulders. She'll never let me, though. And next week our housekeeper,
+whom we've held for two years, is leaving; she must advertise and
+receive applicants--and likely get the wrong one. So that's another
+worry for her. I was alone in the house when I awoke, and I could not
+waste such autumn weather as this!"
+
+He looked at her with anxiety--the physician again.
+
+"I saw trouble in your face last night. It isn't normal that you should
+be tired out so soon after the perfect condition you achieved at
+Berkeley Center."
+
+"No, it isn't. I know that perfectly, and I'm resigned to it."
+
+"I won't ask you to let _me_ treat you--but why don't you go to some
+physician about it? You know how much this case means to me."
+
+For a time she did not reply. She only kept her eyes on the autumn
+tints of the park, streaking past them like a gaudy Roman scarf.
+
+"No," she said at length, "no physician like you can heal me. Greater
+physicians, higher ones, for me. And they will not--will not--" She was
+silent again.
+
+"Are you coming back again to that queer business of which you told
+me--that day on the tennis court?"
+
+"To just that."
+
+"What can such a thing have to do with your physical condition?"
+
+"You will not laugh?"
+
+"At you and yours and anything which touches you--no. You know I could
+not laugh now. Little as I respect that obstacle, it is the most
+serious fact I know."
+
+His eyes were on the steering of the automobile. He could not see that
+her lips pursed up as though to form certain low and tender words, and
+that her sapphirine eyes swept him before she controlled herself to go
+on.
+
+"Aunt Paula says it is part of the struggle. Some people, when the
+power is coming into them, are violent. Men, she says, have smashed
+furniture and torn their bodies. I am not strong to do such things, but
+only weak to endure. And so it takes me as it does.
+
+"Don't you see?" she added, "that if I'm to give up so many powers of
+my mind, so many needs of my soul, to this thing, I can afford to give
+up a few powers of my body? Am I to become a Light without sacrificing
+all? So I keep away from physicians. It is Aunt Paula's wish, and she
+has always known what is best for me."
+
+The automobile was running at an even fifteen miles an hour down a
+broad, unobstructed parkway. He could turn his eyes from his business
+and let his hands guide. So he looked full at her, as he said:
+
+"She may have a hard time keeping you away from this physician!"
+
+That, it seemed, amused her. The strain in her face gave way to a
+smile.
+
+"For yourself, she likes you, I think," said Annette.
+
+"She has a most apt and happy way of showing it," he responded, his
+slights rising up in him.
+
+"You mustn't judge her by last night," replied Annette. "Aunt Paula has
+many manners. I think she assumes that one when she is studying people.
+Then think of the double reason she has for receiving you coldly--my
+whole future, as she plans it, hangs on it--and she spoke nicely of
+you. She likes your eyes and your wit and your manners. But--"
+
+"But I am an undesirable acquaintance for her niece just the same!"
+
+"Have I not said that you are--the obstacle? Haven't her controls told
+her that? If not, why did she telegraph to me when she did?" Then, as
+they turned from the park corner and made towards Riverside Drive,
+something in her changed.
+
+"Must we talk this out whenever we meet? You said once that you would
+teach me to play. Ah, teach me now! I need it!"
+
+And though he turned and twisted back toward the subject, she was pure
+girl for the next hour. The river breezes blew sparkle into her eyes;
+the morning intoxicated her tongue. She chattered of the trees, the
+water, the children on the benches, the gossiping old women. She made
+him stop to buy chestnuts of an Italian vendor, she led him toward his
+tales of the Philippines. He plunged into the Islands like a white
+Othello, charming a super-white Desdemona. It was his story of the
+burning of Manila which brought him back to the vexation in his mind.
+
+"That yarn seemed to make a very small hit last night," he said,
+turning suddenly upon her.
+
+"I didn't like it so much last night," she answered frankly.
+
+"What was the matter?" he asked. "Why were you so far away? Were you
+afraid of Mrs. Markham? I felt like the young man of a summer
+flirtation calling in the winter. What was it?"
+
+"I don't know," she answered.
+
+"No--tell me."
+
+"There wasn't any reason. I liked you last night as I always like you.
+But we were far away. Shall I tell you how it seemed to me? I was like
+an actress on the stage, and you like a man in the audience. I was
+speaking to you--a part. In no way could you answer me. In no way could
+I answer you directly. We moved near to each other, but in different
+worlds. It was something like that."
+
+"I suppose"--bitterly--"your Aunt Paula had nothing to do with that?"
+
+"You must like Aunt Paula if you are to like me," she warned. "Yet that
+may have something to do with it. I am wonderfully influenced by what
+she thinks--as is right."
+
+"Then it's coming to a fight between me and your Aunt Paula? For I'll
+do even that."
+
+"Must we go all over it again? Oh like me, like me, and give me a rest
+from it! I think of nothing but this all day--why do you make it
+harder? I do not know if I can renounce and still have you in my life.
+Won't you wait until I know? It will be time enough then!"
+
+"'Renounce,'" he quoted. "Then you know that there is something to
+renounce--and that means you love me!" So giddy had he become with the
+surge of his passion that his hands trembled on the steering-wheel.
+Afraid of losing all muscular control, he brought the automobile to a
+full stop at the roadside. Her sapphirine eyes were shining, her hands
+lay inert in her lap, her lips quivered softly.
+
+"Have I ever denied it--can I ever deny it to you?"
+
+The pure accident of location gave him opportunity for what he did
+next. For they were in one of those country lanes of Upper Manhattan
+which, though enclosed by the greatest city, seem still a part of
+remote country. Heavy branches of autumn foliage guarded the road to
+right and left; from end to end of the passage was neither vehicle nor
+foot-passenger. One faculty, standing unmoved in the storm of emotions
+which had overwhelmed him, perceived this.
+
+He reached for the trembling hands which gave themselves to his touch.
+She swayed against him. Her hands had snatched themselves away
+now--only to clasp his neck. And now her lips had touched his again and
+again and somehow between kiss and kiss, she was murmuring, "Oh, I love
+you--I love you--I love you. I love you so much that life without you
+is a perfect misery. I love you so much that my work now seems stale
+and dreary. I love you so much that I don't want ever to go away from
+you. I want to stay here forever and feel your arms about me, for that
+is the only way that I shall ever know happiness--or peace. I wake in
+the morning with your name on my lips. I wander through the day with
+you. If I try to read, you come between me and the page. If I try to
+play you come between me and the notes. You are my books. You are my
+music--my--my--everything. I go to bed early at night often so that I
+can lie in the dusk and think of you. And oh, the only nights that rest
+me are those filled with dreams of the poem we would make out of
+life--if--if--"
+
+Her voice faltered and he felt the exquisite caress of her lips
+trembling against his cheek. As though she were utterly spent, she
+ended where she had begun, "I love you--I love--I love you."
+
+He was aware now that another car whirred behind them. He managed--it
+took all the force in his soul--to put her from him. He turned to see
+if they had been observed; the passengers in the other car, intent on
+their own chatter, did not look; only the chauffeur regarded their
+chassis with a professional eye, as though wondering if they were
+stalled. When Blake drew a long breath and looked back at Annette, her
+face was buried in her hands. And now, when he touched her, she drew
+slowly away.
+
+"Oh, drive on--drive on!" she said.
+
+"Oh, Annette--dearest."
+
+"Don't speak. I beg you--drive on or I shall die!"
+
+And though the car wavered dangerously under his unsteady touch, he
+obeyed, managed to gain the highroad without a spill, and to turn
+north.
+
+She wept silently. When at last she took her hands away and turned her
+face on him, his lover's observation saw how beautifully she wept. Her
+eyes were not red, her face was calm. He took heart from her glance,
+began to babble foolish love words. But she stopped him.
+
+"You are driving away from home," she said. "Drive back, and don't
+speak yet."
+
+After he had turned, her tears ceased. She dried her eyes. Now she
+smiled a little, and her voice grew natural.
+
+"I must never be weak again," she said. "But it was sweet. Dear, might
+I touch your arm? No, you must not stop again. Just my hand on your
+arm."
+
+"Dearest, why do you ask?" She drew off her glove, and all the way a
+light, steady pressure made uncertain his wheel-hand. They drove a mile
+so--two miles--and neither spoke until they came out into inhabited
+Upper Broadway. At the appearance of crowds, trucks and the perils of
+the highway, that silver thread of silence broke. She drew her hand
+away, and took up the last word of ten minutes ago.
+
+"It was sweet--but no more. How long it is since I kissed you! I am
+glad. I shall pay for it heavily--but I am glad!"
+
+He smiled on her as on a child who speaks foolishness.
+
+"You cannot renounce now!" he said.
+
+"I shall renounce. I have stolen this morning--would you rob me in
+turn?"
+
+"It will be the first kiss of a million," he said.
+
+"It will be the last forever," she answered. "But remember, if you do
+not kiss me, no man ever shall."
+
+He busied himself with guiding the automobile; it was no time to hurl
+out the intense things which he had to say. But when they had entered
+the smooth park driveway, he came out with it:
+
+"Do you think that I respect that obstacle? Can you think that I
+believe such moonshine even if you do? And do you suppose that I am
+going to let Aunt Paula keep you now?"
+
+She touched his arm again; let her hand rest there as before.
+
+"Dear," she said, "I have never thought that you believed. I have felt
+this always in the bottom of your heart. I only ask you not to spoil
+this day for me. I have stolen it. Let me enjoy it. I shall not put you
+out of my life--at least not yet. Later, when we are both calm, we will
+talk that out. But let it rest now, for I am tired--and happy."
+
+So they drove along, her light hand making warm his arm, and said no
+word until they came near the Eighty-Sixth Street entrance. He looked
+at her with a question in his eyes.
+
+"Leave me where you found me," she answered; "I shall go in alone."
+
+"But will you tell your Aunt Paula that you met me?"
+
+"I shall tell her--yes. Not all, perhaps, but that I rode with you.
+What is the use of concealment? She will know--"
+
+"Her spirits?"
+
+"Dear, do not mock me. They tell her everything she wants to know about
+me." They had drawn up at the park entrance now; before he could
+assist, she had jumped down.
+
+"Good-by--I must go quickly--you must come soon--I will write."
+
+He stood beside his car, watching her back. Once she turned and waved
+to him; when she went on, she walked with a spring, an exultation, as
+though from new life. He watched until she was only a blue atom among
+the foot-passengers, until a park policeman thumped him on the shoulder
+and informed him that this was not an automobile stand.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+When Dr. Blake woke next morning, it was with a sense of delicious
+expectancy. He formulated this as his eyes opened. She had promised to
+write; the mail, due for distribution in the Club at a quarter past
+eight, might bring a note from her. He timed his dressing carefully,
+that he might arrive downstairs neither before nor after the moment of
+fulfilment or disappointment. He saw, as he crossed the corridor to his
+mail-box, that the clerk was just dropping a square, white envelope. He
+peered through the glass before he felt for his keys. It was Annette's
+hand.
+
+So, glowing, he tore it open, and read:
+
+    DEAR MR. BLAKE:
+
+    I think it best never to see you again. Aunt Paula approves of
+    this; but it is done entirely of my own accord. My decision will
+    not change. Please do not call at my house, for I shall not see
+    you. Please do not write, for I shall send your letters back
+    unopened. Please do not try to see me outside, for I shall not
+    recognize you. I thank you for your interest in me; and believe me,
+    I remain,
+
+    Your sincere friend,
+
+    ANNETTE MARKHAM.
+
+After a dreadful day, he came back to the Club and found a package,
+addressed in her hand. Out fell a little bundle of rags, topped by a
+comical black face, and a note. The letter of the morning was in a
+firm, correct hand. This was a trembling scrawl, blotted with tears.
+And it read:
+
+    Dear, I have something terrible to write you. I must give you up. I
+    cannot go into all the reasons now, and after all that would not
+    help any, for it all comes to this--we must never see each other
+    again. Please do not send me a letter, for though I should cover it
+    with my kisses, in the end I would have to send it back unopened. I
+    send you Black Dinah as I promised. It's all that's left of me now,
+    and I want you to have it. Dearest, dearest, good-by.
+
+
+
+
+VI
+
+ENTER ROSALIE LE GRANGE
+
+
+"Cut, dearie," said Rosalie Le Grange, trance and test clairvoyant, to
+Hattie, the landlady's daughter. "Now keep your wish in your mind,
+remember. That's right; a deep cut for luck. U-um. The nine of hearts
+is your wish--and right beside it is the ace of hearts. That means your
+home, dearie--the spirits don't lie, even when they're manifestin'
+themselves just through cards. They guide your hand when you shuffle
+and cut. Your wish is about the affections, ain't it, dearie?"
+
+The pretty slattern across the table nodded. She had put down her
+dust-pan and leaned her broom across her knees when she sat down to
+receive the only tip which Rosalie Le Grange, in the existing state of
+her finances, could give.
+
+"I got your wish now, dearie," announced Rosalie Le Grange. "The
+spirits sometimes help the cards somethin' wonderful. Here it comes. I
+thought so. The three of hearts for gladness an' rejoicin' right next
+to the ace, which is your home. Now that might mean a little home of
+your own, but the influence I git with it is so weak I don't think it
+means anythin' as strong an' big as that. Wait a minute--now it comes
+straight an' definite--he'll call--rejoicin' at your home because he'll
+call. Do you understand that, dearie?"
+
+"Sure!" Hattie's eyes were big with awe.
+
+"Hat-tie!" came a raucous voice from outside.
+
+"Yes-m!" answered Hattie.
+
+"Are you going to be all day redding up them rooms?" pursued the voice.
+
+"Nearly through!" responded Hattie. Rosalie Le Grange made pantomime of
+sweeping; and--
+
+"I'll help you red up, my dear," she whispered. Forthwith, they fell to
+sweeping, dusting, shaking sheets.
+
+As she moved about the squeezed little furnished rooms and alcove,
+which formed her residence and professional offices in these reduced
+days, Rosalie Le Grange appeared the one thing within its walls which
+was not common and dingy. A pink wrapper, morning costume of her craft,
+enclosed a figure grown thick with forty-five, but marvelously
+well-shaped and controlled. Her wrapper was as neat as her figure; even
+the lace at the throat was clean. Her long, fair hands, on which the
+first approach of age appeared as dimples, not as wrinkles or
+corrugations of the flesh, ran to nails whose polish proved daily care.
+Her hair, chestnut in the beginning, foamed with white threads. Below
+was a face which hardly needed, as yet, the morning dab of powder, so
+craftily had middle age faded the skin without deadening it. Except for
+a pair of large, gray, long-lashed eyes--too crafty in their corner
+glances, too far looking in their direct vision--that skin bounded and
+enclosed nothing which was not attractive and engaging. Her chin was
+piquantly pointed. Beside a tender, humorous, mobile mouth played two
+dimples, which appeared and disappeared as she moved about the room
+delivering monologue to Hattie.
+
+"I see a dark gentleman that ain't in your life yet. He's behind a
+counter now, I think. He ain't the one that the ace of hearts shows is
+goin' to call. I see you all whirled about between 'em, but I sense
+nothin' about how it's goin' to turn out--land sakes, child, don't you
+ever dust behind the pictures? You'll have to be neater if you expect
+to make a good wife to the dark gentleman--"
+
+"Will it be him?" asked Hattie, stopping with a sheet in her hands.
+
+"Now the spirits slipped that right out of me, didn't they?" pursued
+Rosalie. "Land sakes, you can't keep 'em back when they want to talk.
+Now you just hold that and think over it, dearie. No more for you
+to-day." Rosalie busied herself with pinning the faded, dusty pink
+ribbon to a gilded rolling pin, and turned her monologue upon herself:
+
+"I ain't sayin' nothin' against this house for the price, dearie, but
+my, this is a comedown. The last time I done straight clairvoyant work,
+it was in a family hotel with three rooms and a bath and breakfast in
+bed. Well, there's ups an' downs in this business. I've been down
+before and up again--"
+
+Hattie, her mouth relieved of a pillowcase, spoke boldly the question
+in her mind.
+
+"What put you down?"
+
+Rosalie, her head on one side, considered the arrangement of the pink
+ribbon, before she answered:
+
+"Jealousy, dearie; perfessional jealousy. The Vango trumpet seances
+were doin' too well to suit that lyin', fakin', Spirit Truth outfit in
+Brooklyn--wasn't that the bell?"
+
+It was. Hattie patted the pillow into place, and sped for the door.
+
+"If it's for me," whispered Rosalie, "don't say I'm in--say you'll
+see." Rosalie bustled about, putting the last touches on the room,
+pulling shut the bead portieres which curtained alcove and bed.
+
+Hattie poked her head in the door.
+
+"It's a gentleman," she said.
+
+"Well, come inside and shut the door--no use tellin' _him_ all about
+himself," said Rosalie. "I'm--I'm kind of expectin' a gentleman visitor
+I don't want to see yet. It's a matter of the heart, dearie," she
+added. "What sort of a looking gentleman?"
+
+Hattie stood a moment trying to make articulate her observations.
+
+"He's got nice eyes," she said. "And he's dressed quiet but swell. Sort
+of tall and distinguished."
+
+"Did you look at his feet?" For the moment, Rosalie had taken it for
+granted that all women knew, as she so well knew, the appearance of
+police feet.
+
+"No 'm, not specially," said Hattie.
+
+"Well, you'd 'a' noticed," said Rosalie, covering up quickly. "The
+gentleman I don't want to see has a club foot--show him up, dearie."
+
+As Madame Le Grange sat down by the wicker center table and composed
+her features to professional calm, she was thinking:
+
+"If he's a new sitter, I'll have to stall. There's nothing as hard to
+bite into as a young man dope."
+
+The expected knock came. Entered the new sitter--him whom we know as
+Dr. Walter Huntington Blake, but a stranger to Rosalie. During the
+formal preliminaries--in which Dr. Blake stated simply that he wanted a
+sitting and expressed himself as willing to pay two dollars for full
+trance control--Rosalie studied him and mapped her plan of action.
+There was, indeed, "nothing to bite into." His shapely clothes bore
+neither fraternity pin nor society button; his face was comparatively
+inexpressive; to her attempts at making him chatter, he returned but
+polite nothings. Only one thing did she "get" before she assumed
+control. When she made him hold hands to "unite magnetisms," his finger
+rested for a moment on the base of her palm. She put that little detail
+aside for further reference, and slid gently into "trance," making the
+most, as she assumed the slumber pose, of her profile, her plump,
+well-formed arms, her slender hands. This sitter was "refined"; not for
+him the groans and contortions of approaching control which so
+impressed factory girls and shopkeepers.
+
+Peeping through her long eyelashes, she noted that his face, while
+turned upon her in close attention, was without visible emotion.
+
+"I must fish," she thought as she began the preliminary gurgles which
+heralded the coming of Laughing Eyes, her famous Indian child
+control--"I wonder if I've got to tell him that the influence won't
+work to-day and I can't get anything? Maybe I'd better."
+
+A long silence, broken here and there by guttural gurglings; then
+Laughing Eyes babbled tentatively:
+
+"John--Will--Will--" she choked here, as though trying to add a
+syllable which she could not clearly catch. And at this point, Rosalie
+took another look through her eyelashes. She had touched something! He
+was leaning forward; his mouth had opened. Before she could follow up
+her advantage, he had thrown himself wide open.
+
+"Wilfred--is it Wilfred?" he asked.
+
+Laughing Eyes was far too clever a spirit to take immediately an
+opening so obvious.
+
+"You wait a minny!" she said. "Laughing Eyes don't see just right now.
+Will--Will--he come, he go. Oh--oh--I see a ring--maybe it's on a
+finger, maybe it ain't--Laughing Eyes kind of a fool this
+morning--Laughing Eyes has got lots to do for a 'itty girl--" Rosalie
+had essayed another glance as she spoke of the ring. It brought no
+visible change of expression; and from the success of her shot with
+Wilfred she knew that this, in spite of first impressions, was a sitter
+whose expression betrayed him. "Then it's business troubles," she
+thought, "unless he's a psychic researcher. And if he was, he wouldn't
+be so easy with his face."
+
+So Laughing Eyes burbled again, and then burst out:
+
+"I see a atmosphere of trouble!" The young man's countenance dropped,
+whereupon Laughing Eyes fell to chattering foolishly before she went
+on: "Piles of bright 'itty buttons--money--" And then something which
+had been gently titillating Rosalie's sense of smell made a sudden
+connection with her memory, Iodoform--the faintest suggestion. She
+linked this perception with his appearance of having been freshly
+tubbed, his immaculate finger nails, shining as though fresh from the
+manicure, his perfectly kept teeth and--yes--the pressure of a finger
+on her pulse. Upon this perception, Laughing Eyes spoke sharply:
+
+"Wilfred says your sick folks don't always pay like they ought. He says
+when they're in danger they can't do too much for the doctor, but when
+they're well, he's--he--he--Wilfred is funny--a old sawbones!"
+
+"Ask fa--ask him about the patient," faltered Rosalie's sitter.
+
+"Wilfred says, 'My son, it's comin' out all right if you follow your
+own impulses,'" responded Laughing Eyes. "You do the way the influences
+guide you. They 're guiding _you_, not them other doctors that you're
+askin' advice from." Laughing Eyes shifted to babbling of the bright
+spirit plane beyond, and all that the patient was missing by delay in
+translation, while Rosalie took another glance of observation, and
+thought rapidly. Was this patient a medical or surgical case? Two
+chances out of three, surgical; it would take remorse and apprehension
+over a mistake with the scalpel to drive a medical man medium-hunting.
+Her glance at his hands confirmed her determination to venture. They
+were large and heavy, yet fine, the hands of a craftsman, a forger, a
+surgeon, anyone who does small and exact work. Rosalie had been in a
+hospital in her day, and she had studied doctors, as she studied the
+rest of humanity, with an eye always to future uses. Having a pair of
+hands like that, a doctor must inevitably choose surgery.
+
+"Trust your papa!" babbled the Control. "Laughing Eyes trusted her
+papa--ugh!--he big Chief. He here now! Your papa knows my papa! Your
+papa says you didn't cut too deep!"
+
+The young man let out an agitated "didn't I?"
+
+"You was guided," pursued Laughing Eyes. "What you might'a' thought was
+a mistake was all for the best. Those in the spirit controlled your
+hands. Wilfred says 'three'--oh--oh I know what Wilfred means--ugh--get
+out bad spirit--Wilfred means three days--you wait three days--you wait
+three days and it will be right."
+
+"And now," thought Rosalie Le Grange, "he's got his money's worth, and
+I'll take no more risks for any two dollars!" Forthwith, she let the
+voice of Laughing Eyes chuckle lower and lower. "Good-by!" whispered
+the control at length, "I'm goin' away from my medie!" Then, with a few
+refined convulsions, Rosalie awoke, rubbed her eyes, and said in her
+tinkling natural voice:
+
+"Was I out long? I hope the sitting was satisfactory."
+
+No change came over the young man's face as he said:
+
+"From my standpoint--very!"
+
+"Thank you," murmured Rosalie. "I was afraid, when you come in, that
+the influences wasn't going to be strong. A medium can sense them."
+
+"Very satisfactory--with modifications," responded the sitter. "For
+instance, it is absolutely true that I had a father. His name wasn't
+Wilfred, it was James. And he died before I was born. But don't let
+that discourage you. I can prove his existence. The other true thing
+was the corker. I've been to fifty-seven varieties of mediums in the
+course of this experiment, and you're the first to jump at the widest
+opening I gave. I am a physician. I've put iodoform on my handkerchief
+every morning to prove it. I've been listed six times as a commercial
+traveler, twice as a con man, eight times as a clerk, three times as a
+policeman, with scattering votes for a reporter, a clergyman, an actor
+and an undertaker. But you're the first to roll the little ball into
+the little hole. I am a physician, or was. Better than that, you got it
+that I specialized on surgery--and I didn't plant _that_. You draw the
+capital prize."
+
+"Young man," asked Rosalie with an air of shocked and injured
+innocence, "are you accusing me of _fakery_?" But despite her stern
+lips, in Rosalie's cheeks played the ghost of a pair of dimples. They
+were reflected, so to speak, by twin twinkles in the eyes of her
+sitter. And he went straight on:
+
+"In addition, you're the prettiest of them all, and a cross-eyed man
+with congenital astigmatism could see that you're a good fellow. Do!
+_My_ controls tell _me_ that you're about to be offered a good job."
+
+"My controls tell _me_," responded Rosalie Le Grange, "that if you
+don't quit insultin' a lady in her own house and disgracin' her crown
+of mediumship, out you go. There's those here that will defend me, I'll
+have you know!"
+
+The young man's face sobered. "I beg your pardon, Mme. Le Grange," he
+said, "I have been sudden. Would you mind my coming to the point at
+once? I'm here to offer you a job."
+
+Rosalie looked him sternly over a moment, but in the end her dimples
+triumphed. She lifted her right hand as though to arrange her hair, two
+fingers extended--the sign in the Brotherhood of Professional Mediums
+to recognize a fellow craftsman. The young man made no response;
+Rosalie's eyes flashed back on guard.
+
+"How much is this business worth to you?" pursued the young man.
+
+"Mediums ain't measuring their rewards by earthly gains," responded
+Rosalie; and now she made no secret of her dimples. "If we wanted to
+water our mediumship, couldn't we get rich out of the tips we give
+people on their business?"
+
+"But getting down to the earth plane," the young man continued--and
+perhaps the twinkles in his eyes were never more obstreperous--"how
+much would you ask to take a nice, easy job of using your eyes for me?"
+
+"Well," said Rosalie, "if there was nothin' unprofessional about it, I
+should say fifty dollars a week." She smiled on him now openly. "You're
+a doctor. I don't have to say, as one professional person to another,
+that there's such a thing as ethics."
+
+The young man smiled back. "Oh, certainly!" he said. "I understand
+that!" Quite suddenly he leaned forward and clapped Rosalie's shoulder
+with a motion that had nothing offensive about it--only good fellowship
+and human understanding--"I want you to help me expose Mrs. Paula
+Markham."
+
+The announcement stiffened Rosalie. She sat bolt upright. "There ain't
+nothin' to expose!" she said.
+
+"Now let's get on a business basis," said the young man.
+
+"Well, you let me tell you one thing first. If you're pumpin' me for
+evidence, it don't go, because you've got no witnesses."
+
+"I'm not pumping you for anything. I'm willing to admit that the
+spirits, not you, smelled the iodoform--"
+
+"An' noticed that you was scrubbed clean as a whistle and that when we
+held hands to unite our magnetism, you was pawing for my pulse,"
+pursued Rosalie, dropping her defences all at once. Thereupon, Roman
+haruspex looked into the eyes of Roman haruspex, and they both laughed.
+But Rosalie was serious enough a moment later.
+
+"Now when you come to talk about exposing Mrs. Markham, you've got to
+show me first why you want her exposed, and you've got to let me tell
+you that you're wastin' your money. There's enough that's fake about
+this profession, but I know two mediums I'd stake my life on; barring
+of course myself"--here Rosalie smiled a smile which might have meant a
+confession or a boast, so balanced was it between irony and
+sweetness--"Mrs. Markham and Mrs. Anna Fife. They're _real_."
+
+She peered into the face of her investigator. His expression showed
+skeptical amusement. She knew that her passion for talking too much was
+her greatest professional flaw; though had she thought it over
+maturely, she would have realized that she had never got into trouble
+through her tongue. Her trained instinct for human values led her
+inevitably to those who would appreciate her confidences and keep them.
+So the sudden retreat within her defences, which followed, proved
+irritation rather than suspicion.
+
+"See here," she pursued, "are you a psychic researcher?"
+
+"Cross my heart," answered the young man, "I never associated with
+spooks in my life until this week. I did it then because I wanted a
+first-class professional medium to take a good job."
+
+"Investigating Mrs. Markham? What for? Has she got a cinch on a
+relative of yours?"
+
+"Well, I'd like her for a relative," started the young man. Then he
+hesitated and for the first time faltered. A light blush began at the
+roots of his hair and overspread his face.
+
+"I got that you were a physician," said Rosalie, "but there's one place
+I got you plumb wrong. I thought it was business troubles. So the
+trouble's your heart and affections! It's that big-eyed blonde niece of
+Markham's, of course. Well, you ain't the first. The best way to bring
+the young men like a flock of blackbirds is to shut a girl away from
+'em."
+
+Now the young man showed real surprise.
+
+"How did you know?" he enquired.
+
+"My controls an' guides, of course," responded Rosalie. "They couldn't
+find anybody else to fall in love with around the Markham house--ain't
+as smart as you thought you was, are you?"
+
+"Beside you," he responded, "I'm Beppo the Missing Link."
+
+Rosalie acknowledged the compliment, and turned to business.
+
+"I ain't asking you how I'm going about it," she said; "probably you've
+planted that. I _am_ asking you if you're willing to risk fifty a week
+on a pig in a poke? I know about her; we all do. She's just like Mrs.
+Fife. The Psychic Researchers have written up Mrs. Fife, but they ain't
+got half of her. They miss the big things, just like they get fooled on
+the little things. _We_ know. And we know about Mrs. Markham, too,
+though she's had sense enough to keep shut up from the professors.
+
+"You're a skeptic," pursued Rosalie, "and I'm blowin' my breath to cool
+a house afire when I talk to you. I guess I just talk to hear myself
+talk. We start real. I did; we all do. With some of us it's a big
+streak an' with some it's a little. I was pretty big--pretty big.
+Things happen; voices and faces. Things that are true right out of the
+air, and things that ain't true--all mixed up with what you're thinking
+yourself. It comes just when it wants to, not when you want it. And the
+longer you go on, and the more horse sense you get, the less it comes."
+
+Rosalie stopped a moment, and veiled her eyes with her lashes, as
+though speaking out of trance.
+
+"Everyone of us says to herself, 'It won't leave me!' An' we start to
+practice. What are we goin' to do then? You git a sitter. She pays her
+two dollars. And _they_ don't come perhaps. Not for that sitter, or the
+next sitter, or the next. But you have to give the value for the two
+dollars or go out of business. So some day, you guess. That's the funny
+thing about this business, anyway. Lots of times you ain't quite sure
+whether guessing did it, or spirits. I've glimpsed the ring on a girl's
+left hand, and right then my voices have said, 'Engaged!' Now was it me
+makin' that voice, or the spirit? I don't know. But when you begin to
+guess, you find how easy people are--how they swallow fakes and cry for
+more. As sitters go, fakin' gets 'em a lot harder than the real stuff.
+An' before long--it's easy--you're slipping the slates or bringing
+spooks from cabinets--let me tell you no medium ever did that genuine.
+But it's funny how long the real thing stays. Now you--I called your
+father Wilfred. Maybe I'll wake up to-morrow night, seein' your face,
+and a voice will come right out of the air and say a name--and it'll be
+yours. It's happened; it will happen again; but generally when I can't
+make any use of it.
+
+"I'm goin' a long way round to get home. There's some so big that they
+don't have to fake. Sometimes, of course, the controls won't come to
+them, but they can afford to tell a sitter they can't sense nothin',
+because the next sitter will get the real stuff--the stuff you can't
+fake. Mrs. Fife is that way. I've seen her work and I know. I know just
+as well about Mrs. Markham, though I haven't seen her. She keeps tight
+shut up away from the rest of us. She never mixes. But some of us have
+seen her, they've passed it on.
+
+"Mediums," added Rosalie Le Grange, after a pause, "is a set of pipe
+dreamers as a class, but there's one place where you can take their
+word like it was sworn to on the Bible. It's when they say somebody has
+the real thing. Because mediums is knockers, and when they pass out a
+bouquet, you can bet they mean it. No, young man, Mrs. Markham, if she
+_does_ play a lone hand, is the real thing. But I may help you waste
+your money."
+
+The young man had lost his air of cynical levity, he was regarding
+Rosalie Le Grange somewhat as a collector regards a new and
+unclassified species.
+
+"Why?" he asked.
+
+"Who's the greatest doctor in the world?" asked Mme. Le Grange.
+
+"Watkins, I suppose," responded the young man.
+
+"What'd you give for a chance to stay in his office a month and see him
+work? See?"
+
+He nodded his head.
+
+"Of course."
+
+"I was a darned little fool when I was young," pursued Rosalie Le
+Grange, "an' now that I'm gettin' on in years I'm just as darned an old
+one. I like to take chances. See?"
+
+"Mme. Le Grange," said her sitter, again clapping her rounded shoulder,
+"you're a fellow after my heart."
+
+"Just a second before we come to the bouquets," responded Rosalie Le
+Grange, "there's another reason. Can you guess it?"
+
+"I've already given up guessing on you."
+
+On the table beside Mme. Le Grange lay an embroidery frame, the needle
+set in a puffy red peony. Mme. Le Grange picked it up and took a stitch
+or two. Her head bent over her work, so that the playful light made
+gold of the white in her chestnut hair, she pursued:
+
+"Maybe you specialize on mendin' people's bones and maybe your
+specialty is their insides. I've got a specialty, too. You see, in this
+business it's easy to go all to the bad unless you do somethin' for
+other people. You have to have a kind of religion to tie to. Mine is
+unitin' and reunitin' lovin' hearts. Of course you're saying that this
+is a lot of foolishness. Never mind." She paused a moment, and plied
+the needle. "What's the trouble between you and that slim little niece
+of Mrs. Markham's that you want her aunt exposed? An' can't I fix it
+some other way?"
+
+"What do you know about Miss Markham?" asked the sitter.
+
+"I've opened myself up to you like a school-girl in a cosey corner
+chat," said Rosalie Le Grange; "ain't it time _you_ was doin' some
+confidin'?"
+
+"Did you ever hear that Miss Markham had been brought up to be a
+medium? That she mustn't marry because it would destroy her powers?
+That she's been taught to believe that she will never develop fully
+until she's put aside an earthly love?"
+
+"O-ho!" quoth Rosalie; "so that's the way the wind sets! My! I must say
+that's the fakiest thing I ever heard about Mrs. Markham. We all know
+that a medium's born. This dark room developin' seance work is bosh to
+stall the dopes along. Still, Mrs. Markham has always played a lone
+hand. She's never mixed with other mediums, which is why I'll be safe
+in goin' into her house--she won't recognize me. Probably she's kept
+some fool notions that the rest of us lost long ago. But the poor
+little puss!"--her voice sank to a ripple--"the poor little puss!" Her
+eyes grew tender, and tenderly they met the softened eyes of the young
+man. "Just robbin' her of her girlhood! I wonder"--her voice grew
+harder as she turned to practical consideration of the subject--"if
+Mrs. Markham got the idea from them Yogis and adepts and things that
+she mixed with in India. Just like 'em. They've got the real thing, but
+they're little, crawling Dagoes with no more blood in 'em than a swarm
+of horseflies."
+
+"It is terrible to think of," said the sitter.
+
+"You poor dear, I should say so!" responded Rosalie. "Of course, I see
+what you want done. If I can prove that Mrs. Markham is a fake, then I
+prove to the girl that it's all bosh about her not marrying. I can't
+give you no encouragement as far as exposin' goes, seem' 's I know Mrs.
+Markham is real, but if I'm on the ground, maybe I can fix it some
+other way. How are you goin' to git me into the house?"
+
+"This week," responded her co-conspirator, "Mrs. Markham will advertise
+for a housekeeper. I suppose you can play housekeeper well enough to
+keep the place a month, can't you?"
+
+"If there's anythin' I can do," responded Rosalie, "it's keep house. Is
+it a big house?"
+
+"Three stories--three or four servants, I suppose."
+
+"That's good; I'll enjoy it; I never had a chance at _that_!"
+
+"Remember you must get the place from the other applicants."
+
+"If my mediumship hasn't taught me enough to git me a plain job, it
+hasn't taught me nothin'," responded Rosalie.
+
+"Then it's as good as done," answered the young man. "Shall I pay you
+now or later? Mrs. Markham's salary will be your tip."
+
+"It's a good paymaster that pays when the job's got," answered Rosalie.
+Her sitter rose, as though to go.
+
+"Confidences is like love," said Rosalie, "first sight or not for ten
+years. Here I've opened my whole bag of tricks, and yours is locked
+tight. Don't you think you might tell me your name?"
+
+The young man reached for a card.
+
+"Dr. Blake," he said as he fumbled.
+
+"Walter Huntington Blake, Curfew Club," corrected Rosalie.
+
+His hands dropped, and he stared.
+
+"How--how--"
+
+"Spirits--my kind." Rosalie extended her hand. In it rested his little
+card case. "Excuse me. I done it just to show you I wasn't _quite_ a
+darn fool, if I do tell everything I know to a stranger. Now don't get
+silly an' think from this marvelous demonstration that I've been givin'
+you a con talk. It's just a lesson not to take your card case along
+when you visit a medium. It's a proof that I can expose Mrs. Markham if
+there 's anything to expose. Good-by Dr. Blake, and good luck."
+
+[Illustration: "THEN IT'S AS GOOD AS DONE"]
+
+The following Wednesday, at eight o'clock in the morning, a messenger
+boy woke Mme. Le Grange by prolonged knocking. He passed in this note:
+
+    Answer early the third advertisement, third column, sixth page, in
+    the _Herald_ Help Wanted column. From the address, I know it is
+    Mrs. M.'s.
+
+    W.H. BLAKE.
+
+
+
+
+VII
+
+ROSALIE'S FIRST REPORT
+
+
+Rosalie Le Grange, upon assuming her position as housekeeper in the
+Markham establishment, had written Dr. Blake that Tuesday was her
+afternoon out, and suggesting that he meet her every Tuesday afternoon
+at three in the ladies' parlor of the old Hotel Greenwich, which lay
+far from main lines of traffic and observation. So they sat on the
+faded velvets of the Greenwich that fall afternoon, heads together in
+close conference.
+
+"You're wastin' your money," began Rosalie.
+
+"Tell me about Miss Markham first," he interrupted; "is she well?"
+
+"As well as she ever is--that girl's far from strong. The more I think
+of this job"--she reverted to her subject--"the more meechin' I feel
+about it, spyin' on a good woman an' a great medium like her. Git the
+girl away from _her_! Let me tell you, Dr. Blake, your girl's the
+luckiest girl in the world, and I don't care if I have to say it right
+into your face. If _I'd_ had a chance to develop my mediumship straight
+from a great vessel of the spirit like that, I wouldn't be fakin' test
+books, and robbin' card cases, and givin' demonstrations to store girls
+at a dollar a trance. To learn from Mrs. Markham! She ought to thank
+God for the chance."
+
+Then, perceiving that she had left his feelings out of
+consideration--noticing by the droop of his eyes how much she had
+depressed him--she patted his knee and let a tender smile flutter over
+her dimples.
+
+"Of course, Boy," she said, with the sweet patronage of woman, "I don't
+take no stock in the notion that the girl has got to put aside earthly
+love, and that kind of talk. We've all got our notions and our
+places--where we don't follow the spirit guides. Perhaps that's just
+Mrs. Markham's weak spot. Maybe her own love affairs was ashes in her
+mouth. Come to think of it, I never did know who Mr. Markham was. What
+I'm tryin' to tell you is that you've got your pig by the wrong ear,
+for you can't expose what's genuine. And I'm ashamed of what I'm doin',
+and if I hadn't promised to stay a month, I'd leave this very day." Her
+companion made an involuntary motion of alarm.
+
+"Don't be afraid--I'm not goin' to yet. Gettin' the place was easy. You
+want a housekeeper stupid and respectable; I was all that. I was
+bothered, before I got started, to get the letters of recommendation,
+but I got 'em--never mind how. And they were good, too. I'm Mrs.
+Granger, as I told you, and I'm a widow. So I took the place away from
+a Swede, an Irishwoman, and a French ginny. Right at the start, I found
+a line on Mrs. Markham. When she was alone with me, after we come to
+terms, she was just as kind and good as any lady in the land. I don't
+suppose that means anythin' to you, but it did to me. Big fakirs and
+crooks just live their lives in terror, afraid of their own shadows.
+They've got to be sweet and kind on the outside, and so they take out
+their crossness and irritation on the help. I'd rather be keeper in an
+asylum than cook to a burglar. But Mrs. Markham was _fine_--and no airs
+and no softness. If the spirit ever hallowed a face, it's hers. I know
+you don't like her, and you can't be blamed--her keeping your little
+girl from you! But you must have noticed her voice, how pretty it is if
+she _does_ talk English fashion. Now that was my first sight into her.
+Whatever she's done, she's never done materializin', which is just
+where pure, proved fakin' begins. It's as soft as a girl's. It wouldn't
+be if she'd worked up her voices for men controls. I've been
+complimented on my voice myself, but you must have noticed the way it
+slides down and gits deep every little while. That's left to show I did
+materializin' in St. Paul; and I'm ashamed of it, too. My, how I wander
+around in Robin Hood's barn! But I'm full of it."
+
+"Tell me everything," he said, "and in your own way."
+
+"'You know my profession?' says Mrs. Markham.
+
+"'No, Ma'am,' says I.
+
+"'I'm a religious teacher, in a way,' says she. 'A medium if you care
+to call it that. I prefer another name.'
+
+"'A medium!' says I. 'My! I was to a medium last week!'
+
+"Perhaps you don't see why I done that. 'T was to give her an opening.
+First move, when you're fakin' on a big scale, is to make dopes out of
+your servants. Git 'em to swallow the whole thing; then find the yellow
+spot, work it, and pull 'em into your fakin'. But she never followed
+the lead, even so much as to seem interested. 'Indeed?' says she.
+'Well, I see only a few callers, and usually in the evening. I'm a
+little particular about bein' disturbed at such times, and I must ask
+you not to come below the top floor on such evenings. Ellen, the parlor
+maid, always sits by the front door to answer the bell.' That was a
+relief. I was afraid I'd have to answer bells, which would have been
+risky. Dopes that follow big mediums go to little ones sometimes; there
+was a chance that I'd let in one of my own sitters and be recognized.
+And the arrangement didn't look faky to me as it may to you; for a
+fact, you're just a bundle of nerves when you're coming in and out of
+real control.
+
+"'And I hope you'll be comfortable,' says she, 'I'm coming up this
+evening to see if your room is all right and if there's anything you
+want. You'll like my servants, I think.'
+
+"Right there I began to be ashamed of our game, and it hasn't got any
+less, I'll tell _you_.
+
+"It was hard work getting the job to runnin', and I didn't have much
+time for pokin' into things. When I did git room to turn around, I went
+through that whole house pretendin' to take inventories. I didn't find
+a thing that looked out of place, or faky. Not a scrap of notes on
+sitters, not a trap, not a slate, not a thread of silk mull, not a
+spark of phosphorus. I wasn't fool enough to break the rule about
+coming downstairs when she had sitters. Let her catch me spyin', and
+the bird's gone. But last Sunday night I had a fair chance. I knew it
+would come if I waited. There's three servants under me--Mary the cook,
+who's a hussy; and Martin the furnace man, who's a drunk; and Ellen,
+who's a fool. I'd listened to 'em talking and I'd pumped 'em gradual,
+but I couldn't git a definite thing--and what the help don't know about
+the crooked places in their bosses ain't generally worth knowin'.
+Ellen, the maid, ought to 'a' been my best card--her sittin' every
+night at the door catchin' what comes out of the parlors. She couldn't
+tell a thing. All she knew was that she heard a lot of talk in low
+tones, and it was something about spirits and the devil, and then she
+crossed herself. As help goes, they like Mrs. Markham, which is a good
+sign.
+
+"Last Sunday, at supper, Ellen begins to complain of a pain in her
+head. It seemed to me that I'd better take, just once, the chance of
+being recognized by a sitter, an' 'tend door for the seance. So I begun
+with Ellen.
+
+"'You're sick, child,' says I, havin' her alone at the time. 'It looks
+to me like neuralgia.'
+
+"Well, you're a doctor--I don't have to tell you how easy it is to make
+a person _think_ they're sick. And that's my specialty--makin' people
+think things. In half an hour, I had that girl whoop-in' an' Martin
+telephonin' for a doctor. Then I broke the news over the house
+telephone to Mrs. Markham. She waited ten minutes, and called me down.
+It come out just as I figured. She wanted me to 'tend door. I'd been
+playin' the genteel stupid, you know, so she trusted me. And I must say
+I'd rather she hated me, the way I'm out to do her. She told me that I
+was to sit by the door and bring in the names of callers, and if anyone
+come after eight o'clock, I was to step into the outside hall and get
+rid of 'em as quick as I could. Now let me tell you, that killed
+another suspicion. One way, the best way of fakin' in a big house, is
+to have the maid rob the pockets of people's wraps for letters an'
+calling cards an' such. I'd thought maybe Ellen played that game, she
+acted so stupid; but here I was lettin' in the visitors, me only, a
+week in the house. I took the coats off her callers myself and I
+watched them wraps all the time. Nobody ever approached 'em while I
+looked. She had only four sitters, two men and two women--an old
+married couple an' a brother an' sister, I took it from their looks an'
+the way they acted toward each other. The old couple were rich and
+tony. They didn't flash any jewelry, but her shoes and gloves were made
+to order and her coat had a Paris mark inside. The brother and sister
+must be way up, too; he was dressed quiet but rich, and he had a
+Bankers' Association pin in his buttonhole. Yes, they wasn't paupers,
+and that's the only fake sign I've seen about Mrs. Markham. But that's
+nothin'. Stands to reason the best people go to the best mediums, just
+like they go to the best doctors and preachers.
+
+"That sittin', you hear me, was real. I got by the double doors where I
+could listen. You just hear me--it was real. You ain't a sensitive.
+You've followed knowledge and not influences, and it's going to be hard
+for me to git this into you. So I'll tell you first how it would have
+looked to you, and then how it looked to me. I'm not sayin' what she
+gave wasn't something she got out of test books and memorandums,
+because I don't know her people or yet how much she'd had to do with
+them. It was the way it come out that impressed me. First place, she
+didn't go into trance. That's a fake to impress dopes, nine times out
+of ten. If you ever git anything real from me, you'll git it out of
+half trance. Then she didn't feel around an' fish, an' neither did she
+hit the bull's eye every time. She'd get the truth all tangled up. John
+would say a true thing, that only _he_ knew, and she'd think she got it
+from James. Her sitters were fine acknowledgers, especially the old
+maid, and I could tell. That's how I would 'a' looked to you, and now
+let me tell you how it struck me. You don't have to believe it.
+
+"I was sittin' there just takin' it all in, when I began to get
+influences. Now laugh; but you won't stop me. It never struck me so
+strong in my life as it did right there. And it all come from Mrs.
+Markham. It was like a sweet smell radiatin' from that room, and just
+makin' me drunk. It was like--maybe you've heard John B. Gough speak.
+Remember how he had you while you listened? Remember how you believed
+like he did and felt everything was right and you could do anything?
+Now that is as near like it as I can tell you and yet that _ain't_ it
+by half. You ain't a sensitive. You can't git just what I mean.
+
+"An' then _I_ begun to see. I can't tell you all; I was half out; but
+just this for a sample: I had a sitter last week, an old lady; an' the
+sittin' was a failure. Yes, I was fishin' and pumpin', but she was
+close-mouthed an' suspicious. I got it out of her that she was worried
+about her boy. I tried a bad love affair for a lead, an' there was
+nothing doing. I tried bad habits and it was just as far away; and I
+give it up and was thankful I got fifty cents out of her. Well, while I
+sat there listenin' to Mrs. Markham, right into my mind came a
+picture--the old lady leanin' over a young man--her pale and shaky and
+him surprised an' mad,--and he held a pen in his hand, an' I got the
+word 'forgery!' That's one of the things I saw while that influence
+come from Mrs. Markham; and if you only knew how seldom I git anything
+real nowadays, you'd be as crazy as me about her. I just had to use all
+the force I've got to look stupid when the sitters went out."
+
+Rosalie had talked on, oblivious to Dr. Blake's anxieties and feelings.
+He sat there, the embodiment of disappointment.
+
+"As perfect a case of auto-suggestion as I ever knew," his professional
+mind was thinking. But he expressed in words his deeper thought:
+
+"Then that line fails."
+
+"I'm sorry, boy," responded Rosalie, "but I'm doin' my job straight,
+and you wouldn't want it done any other way. And I feel you'll git her
+somehow; if not this way, some other. And the longer the wait the
+stronger the love, _I_ say. She don't seem any too happy, even if Mrs.
+Markham does treat her well."
+
+"Doesn't she?" he asked, his face lighting with a melancholy relief.
+
+"Good symptom for you, ain't it? And I can't think of nothing else that
+can be on her mind. But how that girl passes her days, I don't know. It
+must be dull for her, poor little bird. She and Mrs. Markham ain't much
+apart. She looks at Mrs. Markham like a dog looks at his master, she's
+that fond of her. Seems to read a lot, and twice they've been out in
+the evening--theater, or so the chauffeur said. We don't have no
+private car. We hire one by the month from a garage. An' if I ever
+liked a girl and wanted to see her happy, that's the one!"
+
+Rosalie rose. "Must do some shoppin'. Can't say I hope for better news
+next week, not the kind of good news you're looking for. But I'm hopin'
+for good news in the end."
+
+Dr. Blake remained sitting, his head dropped in depression on his
+breast. Rosalie stooped to pat it with a motherly gesture.
+
+"Just remember this," she said, "you love her and she loves you or I
+miss my guess, an' there ain't no beatin' that combination. If I was
+fakin' with you I wouldn't need no more than that to make me see your
+two names in a ring. And remember this, too, boy! There never was
+anything that turned out just the way you expected. You figure on it
+twenty ways. It always beats you; and yet when you look back, you say,
+'Of course; what a fool I was.' Good-by, boy--here next Tuesday at
+three unless I tell you different by letter." Rosalie was gone.
+
+Dr. Blake walked in the park that night until dawn broke over the city
+roofs. And he drew out a dull and anxious existence,--shot and broken
+with whims, fancies, all the irregularities of a lover,--during the
+week in which he awaited Rosalie's next report.
+
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+THE FISH NIBBLES
+
+
+Quietly, naturally, giving a preliminary word of direction to the maid
+as she lifted the portieres, Mrs. Markham entered the drawing room.
+Pricking with a sense of impatience, tinctured by nervousness over his
+own folly, Robert H. Norcross awaited her there. She stood a moment
+regarding him; in that moment, the quick perception, veiled away by an
+expression of thought, to which the railroad baron owed so much, took
+her all in. Superficially, he saw a tall woman, approaching fifty, but
+still vigorous and free from over-burdening flesh.
+
+"Good evening; I am glad to see you," she said quietly. She had a low
+voice and pleasing. He remembered then that he had failed to rise, so
+intent had he been on her face; and he got to his feet in some
+embarrassment. As she approached him, his mind, going from detail to
+detail, noticed her powerful head, her Grecian nose, rising without
+indentation from a straight forehead, her firm but pleasant mouth, her
+large, light gray eyes which looked a little past him. Here was a
+person on his own level of daring mental flight. He remembered only one
+other woman who had struck him with the force of this one. That other
+was an actress, supreme in her generation not so much for temperament
+as for mind. As he looked over a reception crowd at her, intellect had
+spoken to intellect; they had known each other. So Paula Markham struck
+him on first sight.
+
+He was about to speak, but she put in her word first.
+
+"Do you come personally or professionally? I had an engagement for an
+unknown visitor on professional business. Are you he? For if you are,
+it would be better for you not to tell me your name--I am Mrs.
+Markham."
+
+"I came professionally," he said. He paused. The manner of Norcross, on
+all first meetings, was timid and hesitating. It was one of his
+unconscious tricks. Because of that timidity, new-comers, in trying to
+put him at his ease revealed themselves to his shrewd observation. But
+there was a real embarrassment at this meeting. He was approaching the
+subject which had lain close to his imagination ever since three days
+ago, when Bulger said carelessly that a woman had given him the address
+of the best spook medium in the business.
+
+"I want to know," he said, "all about--myself."
+
+She laughed lightly as she seated herself in an old-fashioned
+straight-back chair.
+
+"If I should tell you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and
+substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the
+unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human
+being, I suppose,--and yet no human being knows himself. If you search
+yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery.
+Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine."
+
+"That is true," responded Norcross. "That is true. But your spirits--"
+
+"Not mine," she interrupted. "And perhaps not spirits, either. Though
+they speak to me, I cannot say that they are real, any more than I can
+tell that this table, these clothes"--her long, expressive, ringless
+hand swept across the area of her skirt--"than you yourself, are real.
+All reality and unreality may dwell in the mind. Though personally,"
+she added, "I prefer to believe that this chair, these clothes, you, I,
+are real. And if they are real, so are the Voices. At least, so I
+believe."
+
+This philosophy was past any power of Norcross for repartee; the
+faculties which deal with such things had wasted in him during thirty
+years in Wall Street. But the effect of her voice, her ladyhood, and
+her command of this philosophy--those moved him.
+
+"Will your voices tell me anything?" he asked, irrelevantly, yet coming
+straight to the point.
+
+"Impatience," she answered, "will not help you. The power bloweth where
+it listeth. That impatience is one of the roads to trickery employed by
+the frauds of--my profession."
+
+A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.
+
+"You admit that there _are_ frauds in your profession, then?"
+
+"Oh, dear, yes!" she smiled back at him. "It lends itself so easily to
+fraud that the temptation among the little people must be
+overwhelming--the more because trickery is often more accurate than
+real revelation. I will confess to you that this is the rock upon which
+my powers and my mission seem sometimes most likely to split. But I
+console myself by thinking that all of us, great as well as small, must
+be on the verge of it sometimes. Let me draw you a parallel. Perhaps
+you know something of the old alchemists. They had laid hold on the
+edge of chemistry. But because that truth came confused, because they
+all had things by the wrong handle, a thousand of them confused truth
+with error until, in the end, they did not know right from wrong. This
+force in which you and I are interested is a little like chemistry--it
+may be called mental and spiritual chemistry. But because it deals with
+the unseen, not with the seen, it is a thousand times more uncertain
+and baffling. We have ears, eyes, touch--a great equipment--to perceive
+gold, silver, stones, trees, water. But we have only this mind, a
+mystery even to ourselves, to perceive an idea, a concept. I wish that
+I could express it better"--she broke off suddenly--"and very likely
+I'm boring you--but when your whole soul is full of a thing it _will_
+overflow." She smiled upon Norcross, as though for sympathy. If he gave
+it, his face did not betray him.
+
+"Then you say," returned Norcross with one of his characteristic shifts
+to childlike abruptness, "that you never faked?"
+
+Mrs. Markham, as though daring him to provoke her by his
+forthrightness, leaned forward and regarded him with amusement on her
+lips. "Men are only boys," she said. "My dear sir--I could almost say
+'my dear boy'--if I had, would I admit it? You must take me as I am and
+form your own conclusions. I shall not help you with that, even though
+I admit to you that I don't care very much what your conclusions are.
+
+"To be serious," she added, "it is not a pleasant suspicion to hear of
+one's self. Now take yourself--you are a man of large practical
+affairs--"
+
+Norcross leaned forward a trifle, as though expecting revelation to
+begin. She caught the motion.
+
+"Don't think I'm telling you _that_ from any supernormal source," she
+said. "That's my own intelligence--my woman's intuition if you like to
+call it so. Your air, your ineptness to understand philosophy, show
+that you are not in one of the learned professions, and it is easy to
+see, if I may make so bold"--here she smiled a trifle--"that you are no
+ordinary person. You have the air of great things about you. Well, if I
+should raise suspicion against your business integrity and your
+methods, it would hurt for a moment, even if there were truth in it. In
+fairness, that is so, is it not?"
+
+"I have to beg your pardon, of course," said Norcross, grown easier in
+his manner. "But you must remember that your profession has to prove
+itself--that they're all accused of fraud."
+
+"Now that you have apologized," said she, "I will prove that I have
+accepted the apology by answering you direct. I am not a fraud. I have
+been able to afford not to be. Still, I have a little sympathy with
+those who are. Did you ever consider," she went on, "that no fraud
+invents anything; that he is only imitating something genuine? Perhaps
+it may shake whatever faith you have in me if I tell you whatever these
+people profess to do has been done genuinely and without possibility of
+fraud."
+
+"Even bringing spirits from a cabinet?" he asked. Just as he spoke that
+question, an electric bell rang somewhere to the rear of the
+drawing-room. Mrs. Markham sat unmoving for an instant, as though
+considering either the sound or his question. The bell tinkled no more.
+After a moment, she smiled again.
+
+"You must know more of all these things before I can answer your
+question. Haven't we talked enough? Wouldn't it be better, in your
+present condition of suspicion, if I try to see what we can do without
+seeming any further to inspect you? For you must know that long
+preliminary conversation is a stock method with frauds and fakirs."
+
+Norcross's breath came a little faster, and a curious change passed for
+a second over his face--a falling of all the masses and lines. Mrs.
+Markham rose, sat by the table, under the reading-lamp, and shaded her
+eyes with her hand. She spoke now in a different tone, softer and less
+inflected.
+
+[Illustration: NORCROSS'S BREATH CAME A LITTLE FASTER]
+
+"I shall probably not go into trance," she said. "That is rare with me,
+rare with anyone, though often assumed for effect. Of you, I ask only
+that you remain quiet and passive. I'd like less light."
+
+Norcross shot a glance of quick suspicion at her as he rose, reached
+for the old-fashioned gas chandelier, and turned the jets down to tiny
+points.
+
+"Oh, dear no!" spoke Mrs. Markham, "not so low as that--this is no dark
+seance. I merely meant that the lights are too strong for a pair of
+sensitive eyes. I feel everything when I am in this condition. Would
+you mind sitting a little further away? Thank you. I think that's
+right. Please do not speak to me until I speak, and do not be
+disappointed if I tell you nothing."
+
+For five minutes, no sound broke the silence in Mrs. Markham's
+drawing-room, except the hiss of a light, quick breath and the intake
+and outgo of a heavier, slower one. And so suddenly, with such
+smothered intensity, that Norcross started in his seat, Mrs. Markham's
+voice emitted the first quaver of a musical note. She held it for a
+moment, before she began to hum over and over three bars of an old
+tune--"Wild roamed an Indian maid, bright Alfaretta." Thrice she hummed
+it, still sitting with her hand over her eyes.--"Wild roamed an Indian
+maid--" Then silence. But now, the breath of Norcross was coming more
+heavily, and the masses of his face had still further fallen. After an
+interval, Mrs. Markham spoke, in a low, even tone:
+
+"It is Lallie."
+
+Another period of heavy silence.
+
+"I cannot see her nor hear her speak. Martha, my control, is speaking
+for her. But Martha shows me the picture of a child--a little girl in
+an old-fashioned dress. And I think she is saying that name--Lallie."
+
+The silence again, so that when Norcross moistened his dry lips with
+his tongue the slight smack seemed like the crackle of a fire.
+
+"I see it more clearly now and I understand. The child gave her that
+name, but someone else used it for a love name. It was just between
+those two." The rest came in scattered sentences, with long pauses
+between--"I hear that song again--it was her favorite--I understand now
+why it comes--she was singing it when--Yes, you are the man--when you
+told her--She calls you Bobbert--and now I cannot see."
+
+A bead of perspiration had appeared so suddenly on the forehead of
+Norcross that it had the effect of bursting from a pore. He was on his
+feet, was pacing the floor in his jerky little walk. When, after one
+course of the drawing-room, he turned back, Mrs. Markham had taken her
+hand from her eyes, and was facing him.
+
+"Oh, why did you do that?" she asked. "It has its effect on me--you do
+not know how much!" Her manner spoke a smothered irritation. "I shall
+not see Lallie to-night. And she was very near."
+
+As though something had clicked and fallen into place within him,
+Norcross straightened and stiffened, controlled the relaxed muscles of
+his face, flashed his eyes on Mrs. Markham.
+
+"Might I ask some questions?" he said.
+
+"You must sit quietly," she answered, "and though I can never see so
+well after the first contact breaks, Martha may speak for you. Sit as
+you did, and wait for me." Norcross walked at his nervous, hurried
+little pace back to his seat on the sofa. His face was quite controlled
+now, and his sharp eyes held all their native cunning. That grip on
+himself grew, as he waited for the inert seeress to speak again.
+
+"Martha says, 'I will try,'" she gave out finally. "Quick--with your
+question--with your lips, not your mind--I am not strong enough now."
+
+"What was Lallie's real name?"
+
+"Helen."
+
+"Her other name?"
+
+A pause, then:
+
+"Martha is silent. You are testing me. Tell something you want to
+know--even advice."
+
+"Was there ever anyone else?"
+
+A pause again, then:
+
+"Never. She loved you wholly. She was angry over a little thing, just
+jealousy, during that last quarrel. She had already forgiven. It was
+only a girl's whim. Do you want advice?"
+
+Norcross thrusted obliquely from the corner of his eye at Mrs. Markham
+and looked down at the floor.
+
+"Ask her if I shall sell," he said.
+
+The answer came so suddenly that it overlapped the last words of his
+sentence.
+
+"Martha says that she is going away." No more for two silent minutes;
+no more until Mrs. Markham dropped her hand from her eyes, turned to
+Norcross, and said in a normal, sprightly tone:
+
+"It is all over for this evening. I suppose the trouble lay in your
+last question. I am sorry--if you came here looking for business
+advice--that you got only the things of the affections. To your old
+love affairs, I had an unusually quick response to-night." She leaned
+heavily back in her chair. "Excuse me if I seem tired. There is a kind
+of inner strain about this which you cannot know--a strain at the core.
+It does not affect the surface, but it makes you languid." Yet her
+manner, as she threw herself back, invited him to linger.
+
+"I shall not ask you," she went on, "whether the things I told you
+to-night are true. We all have our human vanities in our work; we like
+to hear it praised. That is one reason why I do not ask. Then I know
+without your confirmation that what I told you was true. When the
+control comes as clearly and strongly as it did for a few minutes
+tonight,--before you interrupted by rising--the revelations are always
+accurate and true. The details I gave you are trivial. That is
+generally a feature of a first sitting. The scholars have found an
+explanation of that phenomenon, and I am inclined to agree with them.
+If I were talking to you over a telephone and you were not sure of my
+voice, how should I identify myself? By some trivial incident of our
+common experience. For example, suppose I were to call you up
+to-morrow. How should I identify myself? Somewhat like this, probably:
+'You tried to turn the gas out completely, when I wanted it only
+lowered in order to save my eyes.' Wouldn't that identify me to you?"
+she paused as for an answer.
+
+"As nearly as you could over a telephone wire," he answered. "You're a
+marvelously clever woman, to think of that," he added. Mrs. Markham
+answered, on the wings of a light laugh:
+
+"If I appear at all clever by contrast with what you expected to find,
+it is because I have not let my mind dwell in a half-world, as have so
+many others of my profession. That is the tendency. I have seen no
+reason why I should not combat it. I believe, too, that I am the
+stronger for it in my work. What was I saying? Oh, yes--about the first
+contact. Probably the last thought of the disembodied, upon assuming
+the trance state--for I believe that the sender of these messages, like
+the receivers, have to enter an abnormal condition--is to prove their
+identity. That is only natural, is it not? Would not you do the same?
+Think. And what do they have to offer? One of those intimate memories
+of years past which linger so long in the mind. Take me for example.
+What should I offer to--well, to that one among the disembodied who
+means most to me? An adventure in stealing cream from a dairy house!"
+As though she were carried away by this memory, her face grew soft and
+serious. With an outward sweep of her hands and a quick "but then!" she
+resumed:
+
+"The best judges of character--and you must be such a one--make their
+mistakes. Why did you ask that question?"
+
+Norcross, glib and effective as his tongue could be when he directed or
+traded, found now no better answer than:
+
+"Because I wanted to know, I suppose."
+
+"Were this Helen in the flesh--young and inexperienced as she
+was--would you expect her to give you advice in any large affair of
+business--would she be basically interested in it? Interested because
+it is yours and she loves you, perhaps--but basically? We have no proof
+that natures change out there. I suppose that isn't all, either. Is
+she, keeping her soul for you in a life which I hope is better--is she
+interested in whether or no you make a little more money and position?
+I can conceive only one condition in which she would mention your
+business. If you were at a crossroads--if great danger or great
+deliverance hung on your decision--she might sense that. I think they
+must get it, by some process to which we are blind, from other
+disembodied spirits."
+
+"Suppose, then, that--Martha I think you call her--had brought some old
+business associate. Would he have answered me?"
+
+"Perhaps. But that does not really explain what is in your mind. If
+this business matter which perplexes you were so vital, don't you
+suppose that some one of those very associates would have rushed to
+speak, instead of a dead love? In that way, I think I can construct an
+answer--provided you ask that question in good faith. It is, probably,
+not very important whether you sell or no."
+
+Mrs. Markham rose on this. Norcross caught the hint in her manner, and
+rose with her. A little "oh!" escaped her, and her face lighted.
+
+"I know who you are, now!" she said. "You are Robert H. Norcross of the
+Norcross lines!"
+
+Norcross started.
+
+"Please do not think I got _that_ by any supernormal means!" she added
+quickly. "I mention it only to be frank with you. From the moment I saw
+you, I was perplexed by a memory and a resemblance. Then, too, I caught
+the air of big things about you. That attitude which you have just
+taken solved it all. It is the counterpart of your photograph in last
+Sunday's _Times_--the full-page snap shot. I must be frank with you or
+you will not believe me."
+
+The mustache of Norcross raised just a trifle, and his eyes glittered.
+
+"Passing over what I may think of your revelations," he said, "you're a
+remarkable woman."
+
+"If you're coming again," said Mrs. Markham, "perhaps you'd better not
+delve into my personality. It interferes. Understand, I'm really
+flattered to have a man like you take notice of this work. That's why I
+ask that your notice shan't be personal. At least not yet."
+
+"Since this is a--a--professional relation, may I ask how much I owe
+you?"
+
+"My price is twenty-five dollars a sitting--for those who can afford
+it."
+
+Norcross drew out his wallet, handed Mrs. Markham three bills. Without
+looking at them, she dropped them on the table beside her. "You see,"
+she went on as though her mind were still following their discussion,
+"I don't like to talk much with my--patients. I never can know when I
+may unconsciously steal from what they tell me."
+
+At the entrance, Norcross hesitated, as though hoping for something
+more than a good-night. No more than that did she give him, however. He
+himself was obliged to introduce the subject in his mind. "If I should
+come again, would Helen tell me more?"
+
+"Perhaps. From the excellent result to-night I should call it likely."
+
+"Then may I come again?" His voice broke once, as with eagerness.
+
+"Certainly. Will you make an appointment?"
+
+"Tuesday night?"
+
+"I had an engagement for Tuesday. Could you come as well on Friday?"
+
+And though it meant postponing a directors' meeting, he answered
+promptly:
+
+"Very well. Say Friday at eight."
+
+And now he was in his automobile. He settled himself against the
+cushions and held the attitude, without motion. For five minutes he sat
+so, until the chauffeur, who had been throwing nervous backward glances
+through the limousine windows, asked:
+
+"I beg your pardon, sir, did you say 'home'?"
+
+"Yes, home," responded Norcross. And even on those words, his voice
+broke again.
+
+Mrs. Markham stood beside the table, hardly moving, until she knew by
+whir and horn that the Norcross automobile was gone. Then she sent
+Ellen to bed, and herself moved quickly to a secretary in the little
+alcove library back of the drawing-room. Taking a key from her bosom,
+she unlocked a drawer and took out a packet of yellow legal cap paper.
+Holding this document concealed in a fold of her waist, she passed
+rapidly to an apartment upstairs. She opened the door softly, and
+listened. Nothing sounded within but the light, even breathing of a
+sleeper. After a moment, she crossed the room, finding her way expertly
+in the darkness. Well within, she knelt and began some operation on the
+floor.
+
+And her hand made a slip. A crash echoed through the house. Following
+the startled, half-articulate cry of a sudden awakening, Mrs. Markham,
+still finding her way with marvelous precision in the darkness, passed
+through a set of portieres and crossed to the bed.
+
+"Hush, dear," she said, "I only came upstairs to borrow a handkerchief.
+Go to sleep. I'm sure it won't bother your rest. Don't think of it
+again."
+
+
+
+
+IX
+
+ROSALIE'S SECOND REPORT
+
+
+As though to prove her maxim, "Nothing turns out the way you expect
+it," Rosalie, on her second Tuesday off, failed to meet her anxious
+young employer in the ladies' parlor of the Hotel Greenwich. Instead
+came a page, calling "Dr. Blake!" It was a note--"Stuyvesant Fish Park
+as soon as you get this. R. Le G.," it read. Dr. Blake leaped into a
+taxicab and hurried to the rendezvous. He spied her on a park bench,
+watching with interest the maneuvers of the little Russian girls, as
+they swarmed over the rocker swings. Even before he came within
+speaking distance of her, he perceived that something must have
+happened--read it in her attitude, her manner of one who lulls a
+suppressed excitement. When she turned to answer his quick "Mme. Le
+Grange!" her cheeks carried a faint color, and her gray eyes were
+shining. But her face was serious, too; her dimples, barometer of her
+gayer emotions, never once rippled. Before he was fairly seated, she
+tumbled out the news in a rush:
+
+"Well! I never was more fooled in my life!"
+
+"She's a fraud!" He jumped joyously to conclusions. "You can prove it!"
+
+Rosalie put a slender finger to her lips.
+
+"Not so loud. Yids have ears. I ain't dead sure of anything now. I
+ain't even sure she don't have me followed when I leave the house.
+That's why I sent for you to change meeting places. There's nothing as
+safe as outdoors, because you can watch the approaches."
+
+"But is she a fake? Can you prove it?" persisted Dr. Blake.
+
+"I'm a woman," responded Rosalie Le Grange, "not a newspaper reporter.
+I can't tell my story in a headline before I git to it. I've got to go
+my own gait or I can't go at all. Now you listen and don't interrupt,
+or I'll explode. It goes back, anyhow, into our last talk.
+
+"I was comin' downstairs in the afternoon a week ago Thursday, and I
+saw Ellen let in a man. Good-looking man. Good dresser. Seemed about
+thirty-five till you looked over his hands and the creases around his
+eyes, when you saw he was risin' forty-five if a day. Stranger, I
+guess, for Ellen kept him waiting in the hall. He read the papers while
+he waited, and he didn't look at nothing but the financial columns. I
+took it from that, he was in Wall Street, though you can't never tell
+in New York, where they all play the market or the ponies. I didn't
+wait to size him up real careful; that wouldn't do. I just passed on
+down to the pantry and then passed back again. He was still there. This
+time he had put up his newspapers, and he was looking over some pencil
+notes on that yellow legal cap paper. He didn't hear me until I was
+close on him, the rugs in the hall are that big and soft. But when I
+did get close, he jumped like I had caught him in something crooked and
+made like he was goin' to hide the sheets. Of course, I didn't look at
+him, but just kept right on upstairs. When I turned into the second
+floor, I heard Ellen say, 'Mrs. Markham will receive you.' I didn't pay
+no attention to that at the time. It was only one of twenty little
+things I remembered. Stayed in the back of my head, waitin' to tie up
+with something else.
+
+"Come Tuesday--week ago to-day and my afternoon off. I was comin' home
+early, about nine o'clock. I've got front door privileges, but I
+generally use the servants' entrance just the same. Right ahead of me,
+a green automobile with one of those limousine bodies drove up to the
+front door. It's dark down in the area by the servants' entrance. I
+stopped like I was huntin' through my skirt for my key, and looked. Out
+of the automobile come a man. He turned around to speak to the
+chauffeur and I got the light on his face. _Who_ do you suppose it was?
+Robert H. Norcross!"
+
+"The railroad king?"
+
+Rosalie pursed her lips and nodded wisely.
+
+"How did you know? You've never seen him before."
+
+"Ain't it my business to know the faces of everybody? What do I read
+the personals in the magazines for? You'd know Theodore Roosevelt if
+you saw him first time, wouldn't you? But I made surer than that. Next
+day I matched the number of his automobile with the automobile
+register. That number belongs to Robert H. Norcross."
+
+Dr. Blake whistled.
+
+"Playing for big game!" he said.
+
+"That was what struck me," said Rosalie, "and while it wasn't
+impossible that this Mr. Norcross might have a straight interest in the
+spirit world--well, when you see big medium and big money together, it
+looks like big _fake_. And there was the man with the notes who read
+the financial pages--he jumped back into my mind.
+
+"The servants' entrance comes out through the kitchen onto the second
+floor. When I come into the hall, Ellen was waiting for me. She was
+tiptoeing and whispering.
+
+"'Mrs. Markham,' she says, 'wanted that I should tell you she has
+sitters unexpected. There's some of her devil doin's going on
+downstairs to-night. She wanted me to catch you when you came in and
+ask you to go very quiet to your room.'
+
+"While I went upstairs, I listened hard. Just before I came out on the
+landing of the servants' hall, I heard a bell ring, away down below.
+Just a little ring--b-r-r. Now, you know if there's one thing more 'n
+another that I've got, it's ears--and ears that remember, too. I hadn't
+been a day in that house when I knew every bell in it and who was
+ringin' besides. This wasn't any of 'em. But that wasn't the funny
+thing. _It lasted just about as long as my foot rested on a step of the
+stairs_. I didn't make the break of going back and ringin' again; but I
+remembered that step--third from the top.
+
+"'T ain't easy to admit you've been fooled, and 't ain't easy to give
+up somebody you've believed in. I couldn't have slept that night even
+if I'd wanted. I opened the registers in my room, because open
+registers help you to hear things, and sat in the darkness. I could
+catch that the sitting was over, because the front door slammed. Then
+Ellen came upstairs, and the bell rang b-r-r again. I could hear
+someone come upstairs to the second floor, where Mrs. Markham and the
+girl have their rooms. I listened for that bell when she struck the
+stairs. I couldn't hear nothing. The current has been switched off,
+thinks I. Maybe it was ten minutes later when I got a faint kind of
+thud, like somebody had let down a folding bed, though there ain't a
+one of those man-killers in our house. Sort of stirred up a
+recollection, that sound. I lay puzzling, and the answer came like a
+flash. Worst fake outfit I ever had anything to do with was Vango's
+Spirit Thought Institute in St. Paul. I've told you before how ashamed
+I am of that. I left because there's some kinds of work I won't stand
+for. Well, he used a ceiling trap for his materializin'; though the
+wainscot is a sight better and more up-to-date in my experience. When
+he let it drop careless, in practicing before the seance, it used to
+make a noise like that. I fell asleep by-and-bye; and out of my dreams,
+which was troubled and didn't bring nothing definite, I got the general
+impression that Mrs. Markham wasn't all right and that I'd been fooled.
+
+"Mrs. Markham and the little girl went to the matinee next afternoon.
+Now I'm comin' to her. You let me tell this story _my_ way. The cook
+was bakin' in the kitchen, Ellen the parlor maid, who had to stay home
+to answer bells, was gossipin' with her. Martin was cleanin' out the
+furnace. I had the run of the house. First thing I looked at was the
+third step from the top of the stairs. I worked out two tacks in the
+carpet--wasn't much trouble; they come out like they was used to it. I
+pulled the carpet sideways. Sure enough, there was a wide crack just
+below the step, and when I peeked in, I could see the electric
+connections. Question was, where was the bell? But I had something to
+think of first. Where would Mrs. Markham have a cabinet if she ever
+done materializin'? I had thought that all out--a little alcove library
+in the rear of the back parlor. Give you plenty of room, when the
+folding doors were open, for lights and effects. If there _was_ a
+ceiling trap, it must be in the rooms above. I went into--into the
+rooms"--here Rosalie paused an infinitesimal second as though making a
+mental shift--"into the room above. Just over the alcove library is a
+small sittin'-room. The--a bedroom opens off it--but has nothing to do
+with the case. It's one of those new-fangled bare floor rooms. Right
+over the cabinet space was a big rug. I pulled it aside and pried
+around with a hair pin until I found a loose nail."
+
+[Illustration: "I WAS LOOKING STRAIGHT DOWN ON THE BACK PARLORS"]
+
+Rosalie paused for breath before she resumed:
+
+"I went over the house again to be sure I was alone, before I pulled
+out the nail. Well, sir, what happened like to knocked me over. The
+minute that nail come out, a trap rose right up--on springs. I just
+caught it in time to stop it from making a racket. I was looking
+straight down on the back parlors. It's one of those flossy, ornamented
+ceilings down there, and a panel of those ceiling ornaments came up
+with the bottom of the trap. But that wasn't the funny thing about that
+trap, nice piece of work as it was. It's a regular cupboard. Double,
+you understand. Space in between--and all the fixings for a
+materializin' seance, the straight fixings that the dope sees and the
+crooked ones that only the medium and the spook sees, tucked inside. A
+shutter lamp, blue glass--a set of gauze robes, phosphorescent stars
+and crescents, a little rope ladder all curled up--and whole books of
+notes. Right on top was"--she paused impressively to get suspense for
+her climax--"was them notes on yellow foolscap that I seen in the hands
+of the visitor last week. And"--another impressive pause--"they're the
+dope for Robert H. Norcross!"
+
+"The what?"
+
+"The full information on him--dead sweetheart, passed out thirty years
+ago up-state. Fine job with good little details--whoever got 'em must
+'a' talked with somebody that was right close to her--an old aunt, I'm
+thinking. But no medium made them notes. Looks like a private
+detective's work. Not a bit of professional talk. The notes on Robert
+H. Norcross. See!"
+
+Dr. Blake, whose face had lightened more and more as he listened,
+jumped up and grasped Rosalie's hand.
+
+"Didn't I tell you!" he cried. "Didn't I tell you!"
+
+But she failed to respond to his enthusiasm. She turned on him a grave
+face; and her eyes shone.
+
+"What I'm wondering," she said, "is who plays her spook? 'Cause if she
+has a trap, she uses confederates, and it can't be none of the
+servants, unless I'm worse fooled on that little Ellen than ever I was
+on Mrs. Markham. That's the next thing to consider."
+
+"Does look curious," replied Dr. Blake, "but of course you can be
+trusted to discover that! But about Annette?"
+
+"Something's a little wrong there," responded Rosalie. "Quiet, and
+dopey, and strange. That,"--her voice fell to soft contemplation,--"is
+another thing to find out."
+
+"We must get her out of there!" he exploded; "away from that vampire!"
+
+"Well, that's what I'm takin' your money for, ain't it?" responded
+Rosalie.
+
+After they parted Rosalie Le Grange stood on a corner, among the
+push-cart peddlers and the bargaining wives, and watched Dr. Blake's
+taxicab disappear down Stanton Street.
+
+"Ain't it funny?" she said half aloud, "that a smart young man like him
+never thought to ask whose room it was I found the trap in?"
+
+
+
+
+X
+
+THE STREAMS CONVERGE
+
+
+Bulger, trailing whiffs of out-door air, had dropped into the Norcross
+offices to join the late afternoon drink. He sat now sipping his
+highball, tilted back with an affectation of ease. Norcross, in his
+regular place at the glass-covered desk, laid his glass down; and his
+gaze wandered again to the spire of Old Trinity and then, following
+down, to the churchyard at its foot. Had he faced about suddenly at
+that moment, he would have surprised Bulger in a strained attitude of
+attention. But he did not turn; he spoke with averted glance.
+
+"You never asked me, Bulger, how I was making it with that medium
+woman."
+
+Bulger took a deep swallow of whiskey and water that he might control
+his voice. When, finally, he spoke, he showed a fine assumption of
+indifference.
+
+"Well, no. Can't say I'm heavily interested. When I found for you the
+best medium that money could buy, I decided that my job was done. Of
+course," he added, "I was complimented to have you tell me--what I've
+forgotten. If you want to consult a medium, it's really none of my
+business. How the Lusitania does loom up at her dock out there!"
+
+Norcross let his eyes wander in search of the Lusitania, but his mind
+refused to stray from the vital subject.
+
+"You've no business to be indifferent, Bulger. When you come to my age,
+you won't be. Martha says it's the most important thing. And she's
+right--she's right. What's the ten or twenty years I've got to live in
+this world, compared with all that's waiting us out there? Of course,"
+he added, "I don't know much about your private life; I don't know if
+you have another part of you waiting."
+
+"Who's Martha?" enquired Bulger.
+
+"No one in _this_ world," responded Norcross. "She's a control
+now--Mrs. Markham's best control." Norcross jumped up, and began to
+pace the floor in his hurried little walk. Bulger did not fail to
+notice that, within a minute or two, a heavy, beady perspiration came
+out on his face and forehead. The room was cool; the railroad king was
+old and spare. Nothing save some struggle of the inner consciousness
+could produce that effect of mighty labor.
+
+"Bulger," said Norcross, speaking in quick, staccato jerks, "if I told
+you what I'd seen and heard in the last fortnight, I couldn't make you
+believe it. Proofs! Proofs! I've wasted thirty years. I might have had
+her--the best part of her--all this time. You think I'm crazy--" he
+stopped and peered into Bulger's face. "If anyone had talked this way
+to me six months ago, I'd have thought so myself. Do you or don't you?"
+he exploded.
+
+"About as crazy as you ever were," responded Bulger. "Not to sugar coat
+the pill, people have always said you were crazy--just before you let
+off your fireworks. You've got there because you dared do things that
+only a candidate for Bloomingdale would attempt. But you always landed,
+and we've another name for it now."
+
+"That's it!" exclaimed Norcross. "That's exactly it. I dare to say now
+that the dead do return! People have believed in ghosts as long as
+they've believed in a Divine Providence--just as many centuries and
+ages--every race, every nation. We hear in this generation that certain
+people have proved it--found! the way--set up the wires--and we laugh,
+and call it all fraud. I don't laugh! Why, we're on the verge of things
+which make the railroad and the steamboat and the telegraph seem like
+toys--if we only dared. I dare--I dare!" He went on pacing the floor;
+and now the beads had assembled into rivers, so that a tiny stream
+trickled down and fogged his reading-glasses. He jerked them off, wiped
+them, wiped his face and forehead. The action calmed him, brought him
+back to his reasonable grip on himself. At the end of his route across
+the room, he sat down abruptly.
+
+Bulger did not miss this shift of the new Norcross back toward the old,
+iron, inscrutable Norcross whom the world knew. The next remark he
+directed against that aspect of his man.
+
+"It's all right," said Bulger, "if you want to follow that line."
+During the short pause which ensued, he thought and felt intensely.
+Working under the direction of a mind infinitely his superior for
+intrigue and subtlety, he had instruction to play gently upon the
+Norcross contrariety, the Norcross habit of rejecting advice. This, if
+ever, seemed the time. With a bold hand, he laid his counter upon the
+board. "Just one thing to be careful about--of course, it's a mouse
+trying to steer a lion for me to advise you--but watch those people,
+when they get on the subject of business. Sometimes they work people,
+you know."
+
+Norcross's face, fixed on the third monument from the south door of Old
+Trinity, permitted itself the luxury of a slight smile.
+
+"I'm safe there," he responded. "Don't think I haven't tried her
+out--put tests of my own. I know what you're thinking about--Marsh and
+Diss Debar. I tried at my very first seance to make her talk business
+and I've tried it twice since. I couldn't get a single rise out of
+_that_. This medium receives from me her regular rate, and no more. I
+established that in the beginning. Though I suppose the guides could
+advise on business as well as on anything else. But they think about
+other things on the other side than this"--his hand swept over Lower
+Manhattan--"this money grubbing."
+
+Bulger leaned his elbows on his knees.
+
+"It sounds wonderful," he said.
+
+"Not more wonderful than wireless telegraphy," answered Norcross. "And
+the ancients, she says, dreamed of talking with spirits long before
+they dreamed of talking to each other across an ocean. We only need an
+exceptional force to do it. And Mrs. Markham is that force. You know
+the locket I showed you?"
+
+"I promised to forget it."
+
+"Well, remember for a minute. I"--his voice exploded--"I may see her,
+Bulger--before the month is over, I may see her!"
+
+Bulger threw himself back in his chair.
+
+"What!" he exclaimed, jumping with an affectation of surprise.
+
+It was as though the sudden motion, the exclamation had touched a
+spring in the mind of Norcross, had projected his spirit from that
+disintegrating, anaemic cell in his brain to the sound, full-blooded
+cells by which he did his daily business. His form, which had seemed
+relaxed and old, stiffened visibly. He turned his eyes on Bulger.
+
+"Forget that, too," he said. "Some day, when I'm strong enough, you'll
+go with me and you'll believe too." And now the secretary had signalled
+the chauffeur, and Norcross had risen to go.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+The streams of destiny were converging that afternoon; the lines were
+drawing close together. Among the towers of Lower Manhattan, Norcross
+sat baring his soul; on a bench in Stuyvesant Square, Rosalie Le Grange
+had reported the consummation of her investigations to Dr. Walter
+Huntington Blake; in a back parlor of the Upper West Side, Paula
+Markham, with many a sidelong glance at the approaches, sat memorizing
+the last syllable of a set of notes on yellow legal cap paper. But the
+master current was flowing elsewhere. In the offices of the _Evening
+Sun_, the stereotypers had just shot the front page of the Wall Street
+edition down to the clanking basement. It carried a "beat"; and that
+item of news had as much to do with this story as with the ultimate
+destinies of the L.D. and M. railroad. On October 19, two weeks hence,
+the directors of the road were to meet and decide whether to pay or
+pass the dividend. "The directors"--that, as the _Sun_ insinuated,
+meant none other than Norcross. Holding a majority of the L.D. and M.
+stock, holding the will of those directors, his creatures, he alone
+would decide whether to declare the dividend or to pass it. The stock
+wavered at about fifty, waiting the decision. If Norcross put it on a
+dividend-paying basis, it was good for eighty. To know which way he
+would decide, to extract any information from that inscrutable
+mind--that were to open a steel vault with a pen-knife. "All trading,"
+the _Sun_ assured its readers, "will be speculative; it is considered a
+pure gamble."
+
+As Bulger parted with Norcross on the street and turned south, a
+newsboy thrust the Wall Street _Sun_ into his face. The announcement of
+the L.D. and M. situation jumped out at him from a headline. The inside
+information, held for two weeks by the group of speculators in which
+Bulger moved, was out; the public was admitted to the transaction; now
+was the time, if ever, to strike. He found a sound-proof telephone, and
+did a few minutes of rapid talking. Then he proceeded to his office.
+
+The force was gone. Alone at his desk, he went over the papers in a
+complicated calculation which he had made twenty times before. By all
+devices, Watson could hold back the collapse of the Mongolia Mine until
+after October 19. By straining his credit to the utmost--liquidating
+everything--he himself could raise a trifle more than seventy thousand
+dollars. He hesitated no longer. Methodically, he apportioned out the
+seventy thousand dollars among a dozen brokers, who to-morrow should
+buy for him, on a ten point margin, L.D. and M. stock at fifty to
+fifty-three.
+
+This done, Bulger locked up the papers again, telephoned for a cab, and
+proceeded to his club, where he dined with his customary hilarity and
+good humor.
+
+
+
+
+XI
+
+THROUGH THE WALL-PAPER
+
+
+"You've got to do it!" said Rosalie Le Grange; "no half-way business. I
+could show better reasons than I'm tellin'."
+
+Blake paused in his slow walk beside her.
+
+"What reasons?" he asked.
+
+"Now listen to the man!" exclaimed Rosalie. "And ain't it man for you!
+Right off, first meeting, I told you enough to put me in jail and now
+you won't trust me!"
+
+Blake seemed to see the logic of what she said.
+
+"I have cause to trust you," he said, "and I hope you don't think that
+I am afraid of the personal danger. It's just that you're asking me to
+do something which--will, which people like me don't do."
+
+"So anxious to be a gentleman that you forgit to be a man!" remarked
+Rosalie with asperity. "Now you listen to me. I've told you that she's
+held two materializing seances for Robert H. Norcross, haven't I? I've
+told you it is crooked materialization--even if there was such a thing
+as real cabinet spooks, which there ain't--because I found the ceiling
+trap an' the apparatus long ago. And if Mrs. Markham is playin' fake
+materializing with old Norcross as a dope, what does it come to?
+Obtainin' money, an' big money, under false pretenses! That's enough to
+put her behind the bars. So what risk do you take even if you _are_
+caught? She'll be more anxious than you to keep it away from the papers
+and the police. And Norcross! He'll break his collar-bone to shut it
+up!"
+
+Half persuaded, he clutched at his sense of honor.
+
+"But it's a sneaking trick--Annette would call it that."
+
+"Yes, an' ain't it a sneakin' trick to hire a housekeeper to be a spy?"
+Rosalie hurled back. "Seems to me you draw a fine line between doin'
+your own dirty work an' havin' it done!"
+
+At this plain statement of the case, Blake smiled for the first time
+that morning.
+
+"I suppose you're right," he said. "A good officer never sends a man
+where he wouldn't go himself. I'm rather sorry I started now."
+
+The dominant thought in all the complex machinery of Rosalie's mind
+was: "And you'll be sorrier before this night's over, boy." But her
+voice said:
+
+"I knew you'd see it that way. Now listen and git this carefully:
+You're to wear a big ulster and old hat and soft-soled shoes--don't
+forget that. You're to come to the back door at a quarter to
+nine--exactly. Us servants receive our callers at the back door.
+Norcross will be in the parlor at half past, Annette will be in her
+room, the other help will be out, Ellen and all. Mrs. Markham takes no
+chances--not even with that fool girl--when she's got Norcross. She's
+given Ellen theater tickets. That's how careful she is about little
+things. You can see how clear the coast will be. I'm goin' to bring you
+straight to my room like a visitor. You walk soft!"
+
+"But how about that electric bell?" he asked.
+
+"I disconnected it this morning at the trap with my manicure scissors
+an' a hairpin," replied Rosalie, triumphantly.
+
+So, at sixteen minutes to nine, Dr. Blake, feeling a cross between a
+detective and a burglar, stole through the alley which backed the
+Markham residence, crossed the area, knocked softly at the kitchen
+door. It opened cautiously and then suddenly to show the kitchen,
+lighted with one dim lamp, and the ample form of Rosalie. With a finger
+on her lips, she closed the door behind him. His heart beat fast, less
+with a sense of impending adventure than with the thought, which struck
+him as he mounted the servants' staircase, that he was divided but by
+thin walls from the object of all these strivings and diplomacies--that
+for the second time in his life he was under her home roof with
+Annette. It was a firm, old house. Their footsteps made not the
+slightest creak on the thick-carpeted stairs. At the door of her room,
+Rosalie stopped and put her mouth to his ear.
+
+"Step careful inside," she said, "my floor is bare." He stood now in
+the neat, low-ceiled housekeeper's parlor. Rosalie turned up the gas,
+and indicated by a gesture that he was to stand still. Elaborately, she
+closed the registers, plugged the keyhole with her key, and set two
+chairs beside him.
+
+"Now sit down," she whispered. "They can't hear us talkin', though we'd
+better whisper for safety, but two sets of footsteps might sound
+suspicious. The halls are carpeted like a padded cell, which ought to
+have put me wise in the beginning."
+
+"Are you sure Annette's abed?" he asked anxiously.
+
+Rosalie threw him a swift glance, as of suspicion.
+
+"Sure," she said--"saw her go. Now before I let you out, I want to git
+one promise from you. Whatever happens, you leave this house quiet,--as
+quiet as you can. You've got _me_ to guard in this as well as
+yourself--you can't leave me alone with trouble."
+
+"I'll promise that," he said. "Won't you tell me what I'm going to
+see?"
+
+Rosalie, under pretense of consulting her watch, looked away.
+
+"You'll know in ten minutes," she said. "Now don't bother me with any
+questions. I've got directions for you. You're coming with me to the
+floor below. I'll let you into a hall closet. It was built into a--into
+a room, and the back of it is only wood. There's an old gas connection,
+which they papered over, through that wood. Yesterday I punched through
+the paper and hung a picture over the hole. This afternoon, I took that
+picture down. To-morrow morning, the picture goes back. But now,
+there's a peephole into the room."
+
+Dr. Blake bristled.
+
+"Peep through a hole!" he said.
+
+"Now ain't that just like a fashionable bringin-up," said Rosalie,
+almost raising her voice. "Things a gentleman can do an' things he
+can't do! You're tryin' to bust a crook, an' you remember what your
+French nurse told you about the etiquette of keyholes!"
+
+"You're my master at argument, Mme. Le Grange," responded Blake. "Go
+ahead."
+
+"And you promise to leave quiet?"
+
+"I promise."
+
+"There's one place I can trust your bringin'-up, I guess. When you're
+inside, feel about till you find a hassock. Stand on it; 't will bring
+your eyes up to the hole. Stay there until I knock for you to come
+out--let's be goin'."
+
+"But what am I to do--why am I here if I am to do nothing?"
+
+"You're to look an' see an' remember what you see--that's all for
+to-night."
+
+At the door, she looked him full in the eyes again:
+
+"Remember, you've promised."
+
+"I remember."
+
+The dim light of a low gas jet illuminated the upper hall. From below
+came the faintest murmur of voices. Rosalie led to the hall of the
+second floor, turned toward the back of the house, opened a door and
+motioned. He stepped inside; the door closed without noise. He was in
+black darkness.
+
+His foot found the hassock; he mounted it and adjusted his eye. He was
+looking into some kind of a living-room or boudoir. On the extreme left
+of his range of vision he could see a set of dark portieres; directly
+before him was a foolish little white desk, over which burned a gas
+jet, turned low. That, apparently, was the only illumination in the
+room. For the rest, he could only see a wall decorated with the tiny
+frivolities of a boudoir, two chairs, a sewing table. He watched
+until--his eyes, grown accustomed to the dim light--he discerned every
+detail. From far below, he heard the subdued hum of a conversation, and
+made out at length, in the rise and fall of voices, that a man and a
+woman were speaking. Then even that sound ceased; over the house lay a
+stillness so heavy that he feared his own breathing.
+
+Gradually, he was aware that someone was playing a piano. It began so
+gently that he doubted, at first, whether it was not a far echo from
+one of the houses to right or left. But it increased in volume until he
+located it definitely in the rooms below. The air, unrecognized at
+first, called up a memory of old-fashioned parlors and of his
+grandmother. He found himself struggling for words to fit the tune; and
+suddenly they sprang into his mind--"Wild roamed an Indian maid, bright
+Alfaretta." Thrice over the unseen musician played the air, and let it
+die with a last, lingering chord.
+
+Suddenly his heart gave a great leap. For the first time, something was
+happening in the room before him. It came first as a slight, padded
+thump, like bare feet striking the floor. He saw that the portieres to
+left of his range of vision were undulating. They parted--and a pillar
+of white stood for a moment before them. The thing resolved itself into
+a human figure, swathed, draped in white, the face concealed by a white
+veil which fell straight from the head. Now the white figure, with a
+noiseless, gliding motion, was crossing the room toward the white desk.
+It stopped, lifted a hand which crept toward the gaslight. With this
+motion, the veil fell away from the face. The gaslight shone upon it;
+he could see it in full profile.
+
+It was Annette.
+
+In the space of his long gasp, her hand touched the gas jet. It went
+out; the room faded into absolute darkness.
+
+And the vision which stood out from the black background made him sway
+and clutch at the garments in the closet. For her robes radiated dull
+light, like a coal seen behind ashes. It was as though she were about
+to burst into flame. On her head gleamed a dull star; from it, the
+radiance of her robe fell away toward her feet in lesser light, like
+the tail-streamer of a comet. All emotion of despair, disillusion,
+rage, were expressed for a moment within him by an emotion of
+supernatural awe which sent the tremors running from his face to his
+spine, and his spine to his feet. She stood a perfect phantom of the
+night, like Annette called back from the dead.
+
+The pillar of dull light was moving now. She had stooped; he heard a
+faint creak, he imagined that he felt new air. Suddenly, too, a voice
+which had been droning far away became audible. And now the pillar of
+light was sinking, sinking through the floor. The feet were gone, the
+torso; the star of light was level with the floor, was gone. He was
+looking into darkness.
+
+Mrs. Markham's controlled, vibrant voice rose clearly from below--he
+caught every word:
+
+"Come, Helen; be strong. He loves you. His love calls you!"
+
+Silence for a quarter of a minute; then a swish as of garments agitated
+by some swift motion; then Annette's well-remembered contralto voice of
+a boy--Annette's voice, which had spoken such things to him--
+
+"_Robert, dearest, I have come again. Robert, I keep for you out here
+the little ring. Robert, we will be happy!_"
+
+And the voice of a man, sobbing and breaking between the exclamatives:
+
+"_My little Lallie--Dear Helen--how long I've waited--sweetheart--how
+many years!_"
+
+And the voice of Annette.
+
+"_Only a few more years to wait, dearest--and now that you have faith,
+I can come to you sometimes--but, oh, dearest, I foresee a danger--a
+great danger!_"
+
+Ten minutes later, Rosalie tiptoed from the library from which she had
+observed the seance to the last detail of method, and made her way to
+the closet wherein she had shut Dr. Blake. She opened the door with all
+precaution, fumbled, found nothing, whispered. No one answered. At last
+she stepped within, plugged the keyhole with her key, and lit a match.
+
+The closet was empty.
+
+Rosalie crept upstairs to her own room. When she lit the gas, she was
+crying softly and--as of old habit under emotional stress--talking to
+herself under her breath.
+
+"I had to do it," she whispered. "He'd believe nothin' but his eyes!"
+
+She sat down then, and surveyed her belongings. "The job's over. What
+whelps it makes people--just to touch this business!"
+
+
+
+
+XII
+
+ANNETTE LIES
+
+
+Blake rose from a night of protracted, dull suffering; of quick rages;
+of hideous, unrelieved despairs. When the day came and the city roared
+about him again, the habits of life reasserted themselves. He rose,
+dressed, sent for coffee, gained the pathetic victory of swallowing it.
+His face, seared by all the inner fires of that night, settled now to a
+look of steel resolution. He rose from his coffee, opened his desk and
+wrote this note:
+
+    MY DEAR MME. LE GRANGE:
+
+    I understand perfectly your motive in asking me to invade a private
+    house and peep through a keyhole. It was the only thing which would
+    have disillusioned me. Had you told me this, I would not have
+    believed you. Though it was harsh treatment, I thank you. I enclose
+    a check for a hundred dollars, payment two weeks in advance for
+    your services, which I shall need no longer. You did your job well.
+    You will understand, I think, that I do not reflect on you when I
+    ask you never to see me again. You would recall something which I
+    shall try for the rest of my life to forget.
+
+    WALTER H. BLAKE.
+
+    P.S. Do as you please about this--but I should prefer you to give
+    Mrs. Markham the customary notice.
+
+As he sealed the letter and put on his hat that he might go to post it
+with his own hands, he had the look of a man who has settled everything
+and for life. But the clanging lid of the letter box had no sooner
+closed than the look of resolution began to leave his face. For two
+hours, he paced the streets of Manhattan. He found himself at length
+apostrophizing a brick wall, "Who could believe it?" And again, to a
+lamp-post, "I can't believe it!" And again, "She made her!" He wheeled
+on this, turned into a drug store, shut himself into the telephone
+booth, and called up the Markham house.
+
+After an eternal minute, he was answered in Annette's own deep,
+thrilling contralto:
+
+"Hello!"
+
+He paused, controlled his voice, and plunged in:
+
+"Miss Markham, this is Dr. Blake. Please don't go away from the
+telephone. You owe it to me to listen--"
+
+"I shall listen--"
+
+"Very well. You will remember that I have respected your wishes about
+keeping away from you. I do not want to make you any trouble. But
+something has happened in which you are concerned, and which makes it
+imperative that I should speak to you face to face for five minutes--"
+
+"Something important?" he heard her voice tremble. He remembered then
+that cheated and humiliated lovers had been known to shoot women; he
+had raised his voice; perhaps, what with her bad conscience, she was
+thinking of that.
+
+"Understand me," he added, speaking lower. "I shall be kind. I shall do
+nothing violent nor disagreeable. I want five minutes, at your house,
+in the Park--anywhere. Though I would prefer to see you alone, I would
+consent to the presence of your aunt. But you must see me!"
+
+"I must see you," she repeated--musingly he thought--"Aunt Paula is
+away."
+
+"Could you come at once to that Eighty-sixth Street entrance of the
+Park?"
+
+A pause, and--
+
+"I will come," she said.
+
+"Good-by--at once," he answered, and hung up the receiver, without
+further word. Outside, he hurled himself into a taxicab. Spurred on by
+an offer of an extra dollar for speed, the chauffeur raced north.
+
+Annette was sitting on a bench by the Park gate. Not until he had paid
+and dismissed the chauffeur did she look up. She wore a smile, which
+faded as she caught his expression. With its fading came the old, worn
+look; he had never, even at that first meeting on the train, seen it
+more pronounced. A flood of perverse tenderness came over him; he found
+himself obliged to steel his heart. And so, it was Annette who spoke
+first:
+
+"What is the matter--oh, what has happened?"
+
+He stood towering over her.
+
+"Miss Markham, I came to ask a simple question. Do not be afraid to
+tell me the truth. What did you do last night?"
+
+"What did I do last night?" she repeated. "Why do you ask?"
+
+"Answer, please. Where were you last night--what did you do?"
+
+"Why do you ask that?"
+
+"It will be better, I assure you," he replied, "if you do not act with
+me."
+
+"You have never seemed harsh before--"
+
+"Will you answer me?"
+
+A blush ran over her exquisite whiteness.
+
+"I have to remember," she said, "that perhaps I once gave you the right
+to ask such things of me. Last night I went to bed just after dinner."
+
+"Exactly when?"
+
+"A little after eight. I have been tired lately. Aunt Paula saw that I
+went to sleep."
+
+"Is that all?" sharply.
+
+"Why, yes. I slept heavily. The old sleep. The one which leaves me
+tired."
+
+"You did not get up?"
+
+"I am beginning to question your right to--"
+
+"But answer me--_Did you wake?_"
+
+"No. I slept until seven this morning. Walter, Walter--" she had never
+used his Christian name before, and at the moment it struck him only as
+one of her Circe arts--"you are cruel! What do you mean by this? Why do
+you trouble me so?"
+
+Now that she had lied in his face, he felt the blood surging scarlet
+behind his eyes. It came to him that, if he remained a moment longer,
+he should lose all control. Without another word, without a backward
+look, he turned and walked away.
+
+"Walter!" she called after him, and again, "Walter! Don't go!"
+
+But he was running top speed down the footpath.
+
+When he stopped, from growing weariness of soul as much as from
+physical exhaustion, he was on a cross street leading into Sixth
+Avenue. The tinsel front of a saloon rose before him. He tore through
+the swinging doors, ordered a drink of whiskey and then another. It
+might have been so much water, for all it either fed or quenched the
+fire within him. With some instinct to go back to his own private hole
+of misery, he took a street car. But he found it impossible to sit
+still. He got down after three blocks, found another saloon, took
+another drink. This, too, evaporated in the feverish heat engendered by
+his sleepless night. But it did afford an idea, a plan. He would get
+drunk--for the first time in his life, get blind, staggering drunk.
+When he recovered from that, time would have dimmed the misery a
+little; he would be able to endure. Just now, he must get drunk or die.
+
+Alone and in broad daylight, he tried it. From, the corner saloons of
+the Upper West Side to the dives of the Bowery, he poured in whiskey
+and yet more whiskey. Nothing happened; positively nothing. The fire
+within burned as fiercely as ever, the misery beat as keenly against
+his temples. He tried his voice; he was speaking clearly. Once he ran
+down the open asphalt of a water-front street; all his muscular control
+remained. The most that liquor did was to spread a slight fog over his
+senses, so that he seemed to be seeing through a veil, hearing through
+a partition.
+
+On the approach of night, the effect struck him all at once. It came in
+a wave of drowsiness, a delicious sense that his trouble, still there,
+weighed lightly upon him--did not matter. He was sitting in Madison
+Square when he realized this effect. He could sleep now. Thank God for
+that! He turned toward the club, walking on the rosy airs of reaction.
+
+As he approached the club door, he was aware that a woman had
+disengaged herself from the crowd across the street, was hurrying
+toward him. At that moment, a hall-boy dived from the entrance, and
+grabbed his arm urgently but respectfully.
+
+"That woman's been asking for you since four--when we chased her away
+she laid for you--if you want to get inside--"
+
+"Young man," said the voice of Rosalie Le Grange across his shoulder,
+"young man, Dr. Blake wants to see me as much as I want to see him an'
+more. Now you jest leave go of him, and you Dr. Blake, come right along
+with me, or I'll make a scene and scandal right here in front of the
+club."
+
+The hall-boy, with the exaggerated desire to avoid scandal which marks
+the perfect club servant, fell away. As for Dr. Blake, this seemed the
+line of least resistance. Life and death, misery and happiness--all
+looked equally dim and rosy.
+
+Mme. Le Grange said nothing until they were three doors away. Under the
+marquee of a restaurant, she stopped, whirled Blake, whom she still
+held by an arm, within the entrance.
+
+"You've been drinkin'," she said. "Now don't talk back. The question in
+my mind is whether you're clear enough in your head to understand what
+I've got to say, because it's something you want to hear straight and
+quick. See that table over in the corner? Let's see you walk to it and
+take off your hat and pull out a chair for me an' tell the waiter we
+won't eat till the rest of our party comes. If you can do that, you can
+listen to me."
+
+Blake, feeling that someone else was going through these motions,
+obeyed.
+
+"Legs are straight," commented Rosalie Le Grange as she settled herself
+and picked at her glove buttons. "How's your head? Are you takin' in
+what I tell you?"
+
+"Yes. I hear you. Why won't you leave me alone?"
+
+"Tongue's pretty straight, too. Can't have much in you, though you do
+look like the last whisper of a misspent life. Well, men can't cry just
+when they want to, though a woman knows they cry oftener than any _man_
+ever sees. You have to take it out in booze."
+
+Blake heard his own voice, far away, saying:
+
+"What did you come for?"
+
+"You'll know soon enough. If I didn't have the patience of an angel I'd
+never have waited. Gee, those gentlemen's clubs is exclusive! Now I
+want you to remember you're drunk and keep quiet and not hurry me. I've
+got things to tell you. Miss Markham came in from a walk this
+morning--"
+
+Dr. Blake saw his own hand lift in a gesture of repulsion, heard his
+own voice say:
+
+"I don't want to hear about her."
+
+"Will you kindly remember," said Rosalie Le Grange, "that you're
+supposed to be drunk? She came in from a walk this morning about half
+past ten, in a worse state than I ever saw her. I didn't much care, way
+I felt about her then--you know--now let me go my own way. Mrs. Markham
+was shut in her room all the morning. I was busy packing--I was getting
+ready to send in my notice but didn't, thank our stars--an' I didn't
+run onto her but once or twice. She was movin' about the house, and her
+face was like death.
+
+"Just before lunch, I came down to the library, lookin' for a sewin'
+basket. Mrs. Markham was at the table, writin' a note. In meanders
+Annette Markham an' begins to pull out the books in the library,
+listless. She'd open one, flip the pages, put it back and open another.
+She kept that up quite some time. I wasn't noticing special until she
+took out three or four together, reached into the space they left and
+pulled out a sizable gray book that had fallen down behind the
+stock--or been put there!
+
+"Mrs. Markham had just looked up, and I saw her git stiff. She spoke
+quick--'Annette!'--jest like that--sharp, you know. Annette looked at
+her. Mrs. Markham reached over and took the book away. The girl, never
+looked down at it again, I can swear to that--she was starin' straight
+at her aunt. Mrs. Markham dropped the book on the table, but she put
+her elbows on it, and said: 'I'd been hunting everywhere for that--I'm
+glad you found it.' Annette never said a word, never tried to get the
+book back; she jest went on rummaging.
+
+"Well, one thing was clear. Mrs. Markham didn't want her to git as much
+as a sight of that book. Why? It was about the funniest little thing
+I'd seen in that house. Better believe I found business in the front
+parlor where I could keep my eyes on 'em. After a minute or two,
+Annette walked out, listless as ever. Soon as her back was turned, Mrs.
+Markham went to the desk an' locked the book in the top drawer.
+
+"It was an hour before the coast was clear for me to git into the
+parlor and open that lock with a skeleton key an' a hairpin. An' when I
+seen the title of that book--well it got as clear--"
+
+Blake saw, through the veil above his sight, that Rosalie's face had
+broken out dimples and sparkles as a yacht breaks out flags. It
+irritated him remotely.
+
+"What has that to do with the case?" he asked; and then, weakly, "I
+don't want to hear about it."
+
+"If I was to tell you," persisted Rosalie rolling the sweets of
+revelation under her tongue, "that jest the name of the book in the
+secretary showed your girl was all right and you and I was fools, what
+would you say?"
+
+The veil lifted from Blake. It was he himself who had risen from his
+chair, was leaning over the table, was asking:
+
+"What do you mean? Tell me--what do you mean?"
+
+Rosalie herself rose, leaned over to meet him, and whispered four words
+in his ear.
+
+"See!" she added aloud. "See!"
+
+Blake fell back into his chair with a thump.
+
+"I, a doctor and a man of science and I never thought once of that!
+What a damned fool I was!"
+
+"_We_ was," amended Rosalie Le Grange.
+
+
+
+
+XIII
+
+ANNETTE TELLS THE TRUTH
+
+
+It seemed to Blake, waiting in Rosalie's sitting-room for a quarter of
+nine, that this silent house of mystery vibrated suppressed excitement.
+He sat with his hands clenched, his body leaning forward, in the
+attitude of one waiting the signal to strike. Rosalie, sitting opposite
+him, sent over a smile of reassurance now and then, but neither spoke.
+
+There was no need of words. They had talked out the smallest detail of
+Rosalie's plot, even to mapping the location of the furniture. Inch by
+inch, objection after objection, she had conquered his cautions and
+scruples; had persuaded him that the dramatic method was the best
+method. When Blake entered the house, nothing was left to chance except
+the question whether Norcross would miss his engagement to "sit" with
+Mrs. Markham. Rosalie settled that. From the front windows, she had
+observed the green limousine automobile waiting by the curbing outside;
+through her open registers she had caught the murmur of conversation.
+
+So even Rosalie, whose tongue ran by custom in greased grooves, found
+nothing to say until the little mantel clock tapped three times to
+announce a quarter to the hour. It brought Blake to his feet with such
+a jerk that Rosalie shook both her hands at him by way of caution. At
+the door she stopped a second, put her lips to his ear.
+
+"I don't have to tell you to be brave, boy," she said. "But keep your
+head and don't git independent. You do what I say!"
+
+She touched his side pocket, which bulged. "An' not too brash with
+that!" she added. "Revolvers is good for bluffs but bad for real
+business!"
+
+Blake nodded. And for the second time they crept down the silent,
+padded halls to those apartments above Mrs. Markham's alcove library.
+They approached, then, not the closet door, but the door leading to
+that boudoir which he had seen once before through Rosalie's hole in
+the wall paper. Rosalie applied a key, turned it with infinite caution,
+opened the door, motioned him in. The room appeared as before. The
+light burned low over the white desk; the portieres hung close. Rosalie
+pointed to the rounded, further end of the room--the space where he had
+seen the ghostly thing which was Annette disappear through the floor.
+That floor space was bare; a rug, rolled up, rested against the further
+wainscot. Blake took it in, and smiled at Rosalie as though to say,
+"everything is ready I see!" Then for a minute they stood immobile,
+listening. A murmur of conversation came up from below, and in the room
+behind the portieres someone was breathing, lightly, regularly. Rosalie
+touched his arm and beckoned. Moving without sound, they lifted the
+portieres, stepped within.
+
+No light inside that room, except the low radiance from a prone figure
+by the outer wall. It seemed at first that this ghost of Annette lay
+suspended between heaven and earth. Blake's mind put down the awe which
+was stealing over his senses. His eyes sharpened until he could make
+out a few details.
+
+At the right, dimly suggested, was a disordered bed. Annette lay on a
+couch. The robes swathed her from head to foot, but the veil over her
+face was parted as though to give her air. Her eyes were closed; her
+arms, with something strained and stretched in their attitude, lay
+along her sides.
+
+And now Rosalie had her lips at his ear.
+
+"Quick!" she said.
+
+Blake crept to Annette's side and spoke in a low tone.
+
+"Annette, this is I--Walter, your lover. You belong to me. I revoke no
+other commands, but you are to listen to me also and do as I tell you.
+Answer me first. You have been commanded to rise when you hear music?"
+
+As by the miracle of one speaking in normal tones out of sleep, Annette
+answered:
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Speak low. You have been commanded to enter the other room then, turn
+out the light, lift a trap, let down a rope ladder, descend it, and say
+certain things?"
+
+"Yes." The tone was less than a whisper.
+
+"Have you been given anything special to say to-night--has anything
+been impressed upon you?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"What is it?"
+
+"After the rest, I am to say: 'Robert, they tell me that the great
+danger is near. They give me a message which I do not understand--"Declare
+that dividend tomorrow." You do not know the awful things which will
+come if you do not.'"
+
+Blake could hear Rosalie catch her breath at this. It came to him,
+also, that he had intervened at the very climax of Mrs. Markham's
+operation on Robert H. Norcross. But he went on firmly:
+
+"Obey that. Do as you were told. But do something else. So that you
+will remember, I am going to whisper it in your ear."
+
+Blake leaned over for a minute, and whispered. Presently he raised
+himself a little, so that he bent over her face, and said in a low
+speaking voice:
+
+"Do all that. I command you. I am Walter, and you must obey me. And
+remember especially--when you have done it all, then wake--wake and do
+not be alarmed. Do you hear?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you obey?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You will not be frightened?"
+
+"No."
+
+Rosalie touched his arm. Blake, with one last look back, stepped
+outside and dropped the portieres. Rosalie drew him into the hall,
+softly locked the door, beckoned him to follow to the head of the
+stairs. And hard upon this movement, the piano downstairs began:
+
+_Wild roamed an Indian maid, bright Alfaretta._
+
+"Make no noise--and hurry!" whispered Rosalie. Down the stairs they
+went, and stationed themselves by the hall door of the drawing-room.
+There, it was pitch dark. Without risk of being seen, they could look
+along the dim reaches of Mrs. Markham's parlors. From a point above
+their heads, a little, shaded cabinet-lamp gave a fan of low light
+which shone full on the dark curtains of the alcove library. They could
+make out, by his white hair and collar, the back of a man, and a
+shadowy figure at the piano. "Wild roamed an Indian maid" was falling
+away to its dying chord. Silence settled again; the back of the old man
+swayed. Mrs. Markham spoke from the piano stool:
+
+"I feel your influence, Helen. You are stronger every time, dear,
+because his love grows stronger. Come, dear--come."
+
+A pillar of light glowed against the cabinet curtains. Norcross rose;
+Blake could catch a suggestion of his face and collar against the dark
+draperies. There came the same exchange of love words, of pats, of
+caressing speeches, which he had heard from the closet; even now,
+better understood as this thing was, the sound of them drew his finger
+nails up into his palms.
+
+Rosalie's touch brought him back to his sense of observation. Here,
+now, came the climax; here the moment upon which everything depended.
+The low, sweet contralto voice was saying:
+
+"They tell me that the great danger is near. They give me a message
+which I do not quite understand. They say, 'Declare that dividend
+to-morrow!' You cannot know what awful things will follow if you do
+not."
+
+Rosalie's clutch tightened on Blake's arm. For the voice had ceased
+altogether. A silent moment; then they saw the pillar of light become a
+crumpled blotch on the floor, heard a sudden shuffle of feet, heard
+Annette's voice, loud, clear, distinct, crying:
+
+"This is a lie! I am not Helen Whitton! I am Annette Markham. I am not
+a spirit! I am alive! You are being fooled--fooled!"
+
+There followed a jangle of piano keys, as though something had dropped
+upon the keyboard.
+
+In that instant, Rosalie Le Grange jerked the string of the cabinet
+light, throwing the shutter wide open. The details of that group by the
+curtain blazed into Blake's sight as he jumped forward--Annette, all in
+black, her white gauze robes a crumpled heap at her feet, swaying in
+the center of the floor; Norcross a huddle against the wall; Mrs.
+Markham, stiff as though frozen to stone, leaning against the piano.
+More light blazed on them; Blake knew that Rosalie, according to
+program, had lit the gas. He reached the curtains an instant before
+Mrs. Markham, roused to sudden, cat-like action, threw herself toward
+Annette. Blake came between; out of his pocket he whipped the revolver.
+
+"I'm talking to you all!" he said. "You, old fool over there, and you,
+you devil! I'll kill the first that moves!"
+
+Now Rosalie had slipped up beside Mrs. Markham, laid a hand on her
+shoulder.
+
+"Don't make any fuss, my dear. I'm a medium myself an' I've been
+exposed four times. Take it from me, _your_ play is to be a lady--and
+a sport."
+
+Suddenly, Mrs. Markham lifted herself from the piano keys and spoke:
+
+"Annette, my dear, control yourself. Come to me, dear--my poor, insane
+niece. Mr. Norcross, I will explain these intruders later. Come to me,
+dear!" She had stepped toward Blake, who stood with his left arm about
+Annette. Blake felt Annette shrink away from him, felt her sway toward
+her aunt. He raised the revolver.
+
+"Stay where you are!" he commanded. "Annette, listen to me. I control
+you now--I! Until I say otherwise, keep your face on my shoulder. Do
+not look up. Keep your mind on what I am saying."
+
+Annette's first movement away from him ceased. She gave a little
+inarticulate murmur of obedience. Simply as a child, she settled her
+face into the hollow of his shoulder.
+
+He turned to Norcross.
+
+"You old fool--" then he caught the face of him who had been king of
+the American railroads. Norcross had settled into a chair; more, he had
+shriveled into it. His mouth had fallen open as from senile weakness;
+his eyes, suddenly grown old, glazed and peering, seemed to struggle
+with tears. His hands moved uncertainly, feebly.
+
+"I beg your pardon, Mr. Norcross," he said, "I came here to-night to
+take away this girl, whom I intend to marry, and I'm excited. Now
+listen--Annette, I want you to listen also. Keep your mind upon me
+alone, dear, and remember I told you not to be frightened. This girl is
+ward of that she-devil there. Since her childhood, Mrs. Markham has
+been hypnotizing her--for her own purposes. So good a subject has she
+become that Mrs. Markham uses her to play ghost for these
+seances--without her own knowledge--"
+
+"Stop!" cried Mrs. Markham.
+
+"Now, my dear," protested Rosalie, "I've been in the house four weeks
+jest watchin' you work. Your play is to shut up until you see what
+we've got in our hand. If you don't, you'll put your foot in it!"
+
+As though aware of her presence for the first time, Mrs. Markham turned
+and looked Rosalie straight in the face. And as though realizing the
+common sense in this counsel, she seated herself. Only a gnawing at her
+under lip indicated her mental disturbance.
+
+Now Annette, as though beginning to realize the situation, was sobbing
+softly. Blake patted her shoulder; and the passion went out of his
+voice. But he still held the revolver alert in his free hand.
+
+[Illustration: "STAY WHERE YOU ARE," HE COMMANDED]
+
+"Her method is fairly established. In a few minutes, I will permit you
+to see the trap between the ceiling of that cabinet room there and the
+floor of the room above. The trap is hollow; in it, for safety, she
+keeps those phosphorescent robes"--he nodded toward the white heap on
+the floor--"all her cabinet paraphernalia, and the notes on such as
+you. Full information on your love affair with Helen Whitton has been
+in that trap for weeks." Then, seeing how raw was the nerve which he
+had touched in the old man, he added:
+
+"I beg your pardon again, sir; but I must speak of this. Mme. Le Grange
+there--my agent in this house--is an expert on such matters. She
+informs me that those notes are the work of a private detective--that
+the information comes from an old aunt of Helen Whitton who must have
+been her confidante. Do you see now what happened? Every night of a
+seance, Mrs. Markham has prepared for you by sending this girl to bed
+early--by sitting beside her and putting her to sleep. That is what
+Miss Markham, in her innocence, calls it. It _is_ sleep--the hypnotic
+sleep. Miss Markham is in bad condition. Her nerves are those of the
+overworked hypnotic horse. Mrs. Markham has used that as a pretext for
+putting her to bed early. Shall I particularize? Do I need to go on?"
+
+"Oh, pray do! You are very interesting!" spoke Mrs. Markham from the
+piano stool.
+
+"I will--since you wish it," returned Blake with an equal sarcastic
+courtesy. "When sleep was established, Mrs. Markham made her rise and
+dress herself in those phosphorescent robes"--he pointed to the gauzy
+heap on the floor--"put her back on the couch, and gave her directions.
+She was to rise at a signal--you know it--'Wild roamed an Indian maid.'
+Must I tell you any more?" he burst out. "Do you know that three nights
+ago I looked into her sitting-room above that trap and saw her--saw her
+go down to you--heard what she said to you!"
+
+Annette was gasping and moaning.
+
+"Oh, did I do that?" she said.
+
+"No, sweet, _she_ did it," he said. He turned to Rosalie. "Take this
+revolver and keep order for me. Annette ought not to stand any longer."
+Still keeping her head on his shoulder, he seated her beside him on a
+couch. "She has never heard this before, Mr. Norcross, and you must
+know what a shock she is suffering. This is a desperate case, and it
+required a desperate remedy. That accounts for this drama to-night.
+Mme. Le Grange there is housekeeper of this place, and my agent.
+Putting her in this house was part of the remedy. Fifteen minutes ago,
+she and I entered the room where Miss Markham lay in hypnotic trance,
+waiting to go down to you. I supplemented Mrs. Markham's suggestion by
+a command of my own--you know what it was. I took a risk. One never
+knows whether a hypnotic subject--even such a perfect one as this--will
+obey a supplementary suggestion. Had it failed, had she started back
+toward the ladder, I should have turned on the lights and seized the
+spook in the vulgar manner, and Mrs. Markham would have had the
+thousand excuses which a professional medium can give in such
+circumstances. But Annette obeyed--she even woke on my command before
+she had fulfilled the whole of Mrs. Markham's suggestion--because we
+love each other. That made the difference." He drew Annette's head
+closer on his shoulder. "I'm going to take her away to-night. She's
+done with all this." He turned to Mrs. Markham. Her hand still rested
+on the keyboard. Her face was pale, but her lips wore a sneering smile.
+"It is your turn, Madame," he said.
+
+"I lose gracefully," answered Mrs. Markham, "yet if Mr. Norcross will
+think very carefully, he may realize that I am not all a loser."
+
+Rosalie crossed the room to Dr. Blake. "Here, you take this thing," she
+said, extending the revolver, "it makes me nervous, an' I told you at
+the start there wasn't no use of it."
+
+And now, something had clicked in Norcross again. His mouth had closed
+like a vise, light had come back to his eyes; he was again the Norcross
+of the street.
+
+"You're a devil," he said, "but you're a marvelously clever woman--"
+
+"So clever," responded Mrs. Markham in dulcet tones, "that I intend
+never to worry about finances again--by your leave, Mr. Norcross."
+
+"That means blackmail, I suppose," said Norcross.
+
+"Now, Mr. Norcross, I beg of you," protested Mrs. Markham, "I have
+_never_ used harsh names for unpleasant truths with you! Do me the same
+courtesy. You will agree, I think, that the Norcross interests would
+suffer if people knew that Robert H. Norcross was running to spirit
+mediums--my business is little appreciated. The newspapers, Mr.
+Norcross--"
+
+"Would any newspaper believe you?" asked Norcross.
+
+"An admirable method," responded Mrs. Markham, "an admirable method of
+getting these people before the public as witnesses"--her gesture
+indicated Dr. Blake and Rosalie--"would be to sue for custody of my
+niece, whom this young man intends, I believe, to take away tonight.
+Certain unusual features of this case would charm the newspapers."
+
+Rosalie shook Blake's shoulder.
+
+"Doctor!" she cried, "can't you see what she's aiming at? She's trying
+to drag us into her blackmailing. She's tryin' to make this look like a
+plant." She whirled on Norcross.
+
+"Listen, Mr. Norcross. I'll tell you what this was done for! Do you
+know a youngish lookin' man, smooth-shaven, neat dresser, gray eyes,
+about forty-five, got something to do with Wall Street, wears one of
+them little twisted-up red and white society buttons in his buttonhole,
+has a trick of holding his chin between his fingers--so--when he's
+thinkin'? Because _he_ started it. He's the nigger in your woodpile. He
+came here a week before you ever saw Mrs. Markham, bringin' the notes
+about Helen Whitton--the dope that she's been feedin' you. If you'll
+put that together with what the spirit--she--Miss Markham, told you
+tonight about declarin' dividends--"
+
+"Mrs. Granger," interrupted Mrs. Markham, "you are a shrewd woman, but
+you carry your deductions a little far--"
+
+"Deductions, your grandmother!" retorted Rosalie Le Grange, "To think
+how close you come to foolin' even _me_ that's played this game, girl
+and woman, for twenty-five years! If I hadn't caught you so anxious to
+stop that little girl from seein' that you kept Practical Methods of
+Hypnotism' hid behind the bookcase, I'd have gone away from here
+believin' that she was deep in the mud as you was in the mire. You
+certainly sprung a new one on me!"
+
+The eyes of Norcross lighted, as though with a new idea, and he broke
+abruptly into this feminine exchange:
+
+"I do not believe that this is a plant. Mrs. Markham, shall we
+bargain?"
+
+"I like the life in London," said Mrs. Markham. "I have been waiting to
+retire."
+
+"Twenty-five thousand dollars?"
+
+"Oh dear, no! Fifty."
+
+Norcross drew a check book, flipped it on his knee. Mrs. Markham raised
+a protesting hand.
+
+"Yes, you will--you'll take it in a check or not at all," he said. "I
+want this transaction recorded. I'll tell you why. It is worth just
+that to keep this story out of the papers. I was caught, and I pay. It
+is worth no more. I will give you this check to-night. You will cash it
+in the morning. I shall have the cancelled check as a voucher. If ever
+you ask me for a dollar more, you go to State's Prison for
+extortion--on the testimony of these three witnesses. My legal
+department is the best in the country. In short, it is worth fifty
+thousand dollars to me. It is not worth fifty thousand and one. Also,
+you sail to London within a week. Does that go?"
+
+Mrs. Markham drummed a minute with her fingers, and her face went a
+shade paler.
+
+"It does," she said in a low voice.
+
+Blake bent over Annette.
+
+"Do you hear that?" he asked. "Do you know what it means? It is called
+blackmail!"
+
+"Oh, Aunt Paula, Aunt Paula!" whispered Annette. Her face settled
+closer on Blake's shoulder, and she burst into a torrent of weeping.
+
+Rosalie tiptoed to the desk, bringing pen and ink, which she laid on
+the table beside Norcross. It was quite evident that one of their
+number was by this time enjoying the situation.
+
+"Keep everybody here for three minutes--I'll be back," she said to
+Blake, and floated out of the door.
+
+As Norcross handed over the check, Dr. Blake spoke:
+
+"I am taking Miss Markham away. She is not to see this woman
+again--taking her to my aunt's house. I, too, want a witness. If I have
+done anything for you to-night, will you return it by setting us down
+in your automobile?"
+
+"Certainly," responded Norcross. "I suppose I ought to thank you--but
+I've got to think this thing out." He scrutinized Blake closely. "How
+about you and the papers--I hadn't thought of you--"
+
+Blake, still dropping soft love pats on Annette's hair and shoulders,
+looked into the eyes of the railroad king.
+
+"I have earned that opinion, I suppose," he said. "I can't say that I
+feel myself greatly superior to--to anyone here--tonight. But I've done
+what I started to do. My name is Blake, Mr. Norcross--Dr. Walter H.
+Blake--lately army surgeon in the Philippines, if you take my
+profession as a voucher. My father was Rear-Admiral Blake, if family
+will help establish me. Or, better, I intend to marry this girl as soon
+as the license clerk will let me--and it isn't likely that I'll make
+public anything that involves my wife and her people. Does that satisfy
+you?"
+
+Norcross ran his eye across them. It rested a moment upon Annette; and
+a ghost of that late emotion, of which she had been the instrument,
+flashed across his face.
+
+"I guess I'm satisfied," he said.
+
+Now Rosalie, in hat and wraps, stood at the door carrying her suit
+case.
+
+"Sorry to leave without notice, Mrs. Markham," she said, "but you
+remember I haven't drawn no pay as housekeeper for doin' you up. I
+guess we'd all better be goin'. Here's your hat, Dr. Blake, and a fur
+coat and boots for Miss Markham."
+
+Paula Markham, twirling the fifty thousand dollar check idly in her
+fingers, rose from the piano stool.
+
+"I wish you to listen, Dr. Blake," she said, "although you may not
+believe it, I am really fond of Annette. The temptation to use her
+became too strong. Believe me, I have intended for some time to stop
+it. I had stopped it in fact, when this big fish came to my net. You
+have seen, no more keenly than I, how hard it was on her nerves. Take
+her away and give her a good time--she needs it. Indeed, had you come
+into her life a little later, I should have welcomed you--for after I
+found that she had no clairvoyance in her, I wanted her to be happy."
+
+"You had an admirable way of showing it," responded Dr. Blake. "What
+about putting aside earthly love for strength?"
+
+"It kept off the undesirables," said Mrs. Markham, "and just then--with
+this large order in hand--you were an undesirable. I shall not ask you
+to let me see her for the present--indeed, I am going away--but years
+from now, when you and she have softened--"
+
+"When her will is built up--perhaps."
+
+"May I kiss her?" For the first time in his experience of her, Blake
+traced a note of feminine softness in Mrs. Markham's tones.
+
+Blake took the back of the little head firmly in his hand, pressed the
+face tightly on his shoulder.
+
+"Her cheek--yes. You must not look into her eyes."
+
+As Mrs. Markham lifted her face from Annette's cheek, the tears showed
+under her lids.
+
+"But, oh, Annette," she whispered, "I ask you to believe that I am
+real--that once I was all real--but I fell like the rest."
+
+For the first time Annette spoke coherently.
+
+"Oh, Aunt Paula--it breaks my heart--but I will try to remember only
+how kind you were."
+
+And now Rosalie had wrapped her for the street; and now the door closed
+between Mrs. Markham and her biggest operation.
+
+       *       *       *       *       *
+
+Rosalie was first to quit the automobile--she had asked Norcross to
+drive her to a woman's hotel.
+
+"Good-night, people," she said cheerily at the curb, "I hope it ain't
+good-by to any of you. Doctor, I'd like to be invited to the weddin',
+however private--that's my tip. When I git settled again, I'll send you
+my card an' address. Good-night, Mr. Norcross, I'm real pleased to have
+met you. I had a cousin who was a conductor on one of your roads an' he
+always spoke nicely of the way he was treated. An', oh, yes! Don't you
+worry about _me_ givin' any of this away. I'm a medium, all right, but
+I ain't in that kind of work. I ain't recommendin' myself, of course,
+Mr. Norcross, but if you git over this--they generally do--an' want
+some good, straight clairvoyant work done, write Mme. Rosalie Le
+Grange, care the _Spirit Truth Bulletin_, an' I'll recommend you to
+them that are strangers to graft. Good-night."
+
+After they drove on, Blake, brazenly patting and caressing Annette
+toward calm and a right mind, furtively noticed Norcross as the bands
+of city light flashed his figure into view. He was huddled in a corner
+of the cushioned seat; he looked again the pitiful, broken,
+disappointed old man. But when he parted from the lovers at the curb of
+an old house in Lexington Avenue, his voice came out of him with
+certainty and ring.
+
+"If I can do anything more for you in this matter, I am at your
+service," Blake had said.
+
+"I will attend to the rest myself, thank you!" answered Norcross.
+
+"It has occurred to me," continued Blake, "that Mrs. Markham will
+communicate at once with whatever confederates she had in this
+business. I hope you don't mind my mentioning it."
+
+"Probably," responded Norcross, "she's at the telephone now. That's my
+part of it. Good-night."
+
+
+
+
+XIV
+
+MAINLY FROM THE PAPERS
+
+
+(From the Wall Street _Sun_, Oct. 21, 190-)
+
+    Whatever motive impelled Robert H. Norcross to his mysterious
+    operations in L.D. and M. during the past two days, it looks rather
+    like stock manipulation than the larger financing which has
+    hitherto marked his career. When, on Wednesday, the directors of
+    the L.D. and M. adjourned without declaring a dividend, that stock,
+    which had advanced somewhat owing to the speculative trading of the
+    past three weeks, fell from 56 to 50, and closed weak at 49-1/4.
+    Directly after the close of the exchange, Norcross, as though by
+    program, reconvened the directors, who declared a dividend of one
+    and one-half per cent. The news was about by the time the market
+    opened yesterday, and L.D. and M. made the record jump of the year,
+    going to 76 and closing strong at 75-1/2. It scarcely went below
+    that point to-day, and at two o'clock touched its highest
+    notch--76-3/4. Considerable criticism of Norcross was heard on
+    the street to-day.
+
+(From the Wall Street _Sun_, Oct. 24, 190-)
+
+    BROKERAGE FIRM ASSIGNS
+
+    The firm of Bulger and Watson, promoters and Stock Exchange
+    operators, made an assignment this morning. Liabilities $276,125;
+    assets $81,300. This failure followed the collapse of the Mongolia
+    Copper Mine in Montana, news of which reached New York last
+    Saturday. Bulger and Watson were heavily interested in that
+    property. An unusual feature of this failure, according to those on
+    the inside, was the action of Arthur Bulger, senior member of the
+    firm, in the L.D. and M. flurry of last Wednesday and Thursday.
+    Bulger, it is said by those who know his affairs best, had
+    speculated heavily in L.D. and M., playing for a rise. On the eve
+    of the fluky directors' meeting of last Wednesday--which, it will
+    be remembered, adjourned without action only to reconvene after
+    market hours and declare a dividend--Bulger began through his
+    brokers to unload. It is believed that he was acting upon some
+    advance inside information of the directors' action. He was sold
+    clean out of this stock when the market closed Wednesday afternoon.
+    Had he held on, the firm would doubtless have been able to survive
+    the Mongolia crash, for L.D. and M., following the unexpected
+    action of the directors in declaring a dividend, jumped on Thursday
+    from 50 to the neighborhood of 75. The failure will involve no
+    other firms, it is thought.
+
+As the curve of Sandy Hook blotted from sight the last, low glimpse of
+the skyscrapers which point Manhattan, Blake touched Annette's arm. She
+turned from her reveries; the distance faded from her eyes.
+
+"It's the end of a life for you--that," he said. "We don't see New York
+again for two years. We're going back over the girlhood you never
+had--you're going to dance and motor and walk--yes and coquette,
+too--or as much as you care to with me as a husband. For two years,
+you're just going to play!"
+
+Then, noticing the expression of the dog who beholds his master with
+which her sapphirine eyes regarded him, he dropped his hand on hers.
+
+"But most of all, dearest," he added, "you're going to do what you want
+to do! Not what I or any one else commands, but just as your own sweet
+will dictates--Light of me!"
+
+
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's The House of Mystery, by William Henry Irwin
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