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+Project Gutenberg's Etext Sight Unseen, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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+Sight Unseen
+
+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+November, 1999  [Etext #1960]
+[Date last updated: February 3, 2005]
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+Project Gutenberg's Etext Sight Unseen, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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+This Etext prepared by an anonymous Project Gutenberg volunteer.
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+
+
+
+Sight Unseen
+
+by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
+
+
+
+I
+
+The rather extraordinary story revealed by the experiments of the
+Neighborhood Club have been until now a matter only of private
+record.  But it seems to me, as an active participant in the
+investigations, that they should be given to the public; not so
+much for what they will add to the existing data on psychical
+research, for from that angle they were not unusual, but as yet
+another exploration into that still uncharted territory, the human
+mind.
+
+The psycho-analysts have taught us something about the individual
+mind.  They have their own patter, of complexes and primal instincts,
+of the unconscious, which is a sort of bonded warehouse from which
+we clandestinely withdraw our stored thoughts and impressions.  They
+lay to this unconscious mind of ours all phenomena that cannot
+otherwise be labeled, and ascribe such demonstrations of power as
+cannot thus be explained to trickery, to black silk threads and
+folding rods, to slates with false sides and a medium with chalk
+on his finger nail.
+
+In other words, they give us subjective mind but never objective
+mind.  They take the mind and its reactions on itself and on the
+body.  But what about objective mind?  Does it make its only
+outward manifestations through speech and action?  Can we ignore
+the effect of mind on mind, when there are present none of the
+ordinary media of communication?  I think not.
+
+In making the following statement concerning our part in the strange
+case of Arthur Wells, a certain allowance must be made for our
+ignorance of so-called psychic phenomena, and also for the fact that
+since that time, just before the war, great advances have been made
+in scientific methods of investigation.  For instance, we did not
+place Miss Jeremy's chair on a scale, to measure for any loss of
+weight.  Also the theory of rods of invisible matter emanating from
+the medium's body, to move bodies at a distance from her, had only
+been evolved; and none of the methods for calculation of leverages
+and strains had been formulated, so far as I know.
+
+To be frank, I am quite convinced that, even had we known of these
+so-called explanations, which in reality explain nothing, we would
+have ignored them as we became involved in the dramatic movement of
+the revelations and the personal experiences which grew out of them.
+I confess that following the night after the first seance any
+observations of mine would have been of no scientific value whatever,
+and I believe I can speak for the others also.
+
+Of the medium herself I can only say that we have never questioned
+her integrity.  The physical phenomena occurred before she went into
+trance, and during that time her forearms were rigid.  During the
+deep trance, with which this unusual record deals, she spoke in her
+own voice, but in a querulous tone, and Sperry's examination of her
+pulse showed that it went from eighty normal to a hundred and twenty
+and very feeble.
+
+With this preface I come to the death of Arthur Wells, our
+acquaintance and neighbor, and the investigation into that death by
+a group of six earnest people who call themselves the Neighborhood
+Club.
+
+********
+
+The Neighborhood Club was organized in my house.  It was too small
+really to be called a club, but women have a way these days of
+conferring a titular dignity on their activities, and it is not
+so bad, after all.  The Neighborhood Club it really was, composed
+of four of our neighbors, my wife, and myself.
+
+We had drifted into the habit of dining together on Monday evenings
+at the different houses.  There were Herbert Robinson and his sister
+Alice--not a young woman, but clever, alert, and very alive;
+Sperry, the well-known heart specialist, a bachelor still in spite
+of much feminine activity; and there was old Mrs. Dane, hopelessly
+crippled as to the knees with rheumatism, but one of those glowing
+and kindly souls that have a way of being a neighborhood nucleus.
+It was around her that we first gathered, with an idea of forming
+for her certain contact points with the active life from which she
+was otherwise cut off.  But she gave us, I am sure, more than we
+brought her, and, as will be seen later, her shrewdness was an
+important element in solving our mystery.
+
+In addition to these four there were my wife and myself.
+
+It had been our policy to take up different subjects for these
+neighborhood dinners.  Sperry was a reformer in his way, and on his
+nights we generally took up civic questions.  He was particularly
+interested in the responsibility of the state to the sick poor.  My
+wife and I had "political" evenings.  Not really politics, except in
+their relation to life.  I am a lawyer by profession, and dabble a
+bit in city government.  The Robinsons had literature.
+
+Don't misunderstand me.  We had no papers, no set programs.  On the
+Robinson evenings we discussed editorials and current periodicals,
+as well as the new books and plays.  We were frequently acrimonious,
+I fear, but our small wrangles ended with the evening.  Robinson was
+the literary editor of a paper, and his sister read for a large
+publishing house.
+
+Mrs. Dane was a free-lance.  "Give me that privilege," she begged.
+"At least, until you find my evenings dull.  It gives me, during all
+the week before you come, a sort of thrilling feeling that the
+world is mine to choose from."  The result was never dull.  She
+led us all the way from moving-pictures to modern dress.  She led
+us even further, as you will see.
+
+On consulting my note-book I find that the first evening which
+directly concerns the Arthur Wells case was Monday, November the
+second, of last year.
+
+It was a curious day, to begin with.  There come days, now and then,
+that bring with them a strange sort of mental excitement.  I have
+never analyzed them.  With me on this occasion it took the form of
+nervous irritability, and something of apprehension.  My wife, I
+remember, complained of headache, and one of the stenographers had
+a fainting attack.
+
+I have often wondered for how much of what happened to Arthur Wells
+the day was responsible.  There are days when the world is a place
+for love and play and laughter.  And then there are sinister days,
+when the earth is a hideous place, when even the thought of
+immortality is unbearable, and life itself a burden; when all that
+is riotous and unlawful comes forth and bares itself to the light.
+
+This was such a day.
+
+I am fond of my friends, but I found no pleasure in the thought of
+meeting them that evening.  I remembered the odious squeak in the
+wheels of Mrs. Dane's chair.  I resented the way Sperry would clear
+his throat.  I read in the morning paper Herbert Robinson's review
+of a book I had liked, and disagreed with him.  Disagreed violently.
+I wanted to call him on the telephone and tell him that he was a
+fool.  I felt old, although I am only fifty-three, old and bitter,
+and tired.
+
+With the fall of twilight, things changed somewhat.  I was more
+passive.  Wretchedness encompassed me, but I was not wretched.  There
+was violence in the air, but I was not violent.  And with a bath and
+my dinner clothes I put away the horrors of the day.
+
+My wife was better, but the cook had given notice.
+
+"There has been quarreling among the servants all day," my wife said.
+"I wish I could go and live on a desert island."
+
+We have no children, and my wife, for lack of other interests, finds
+her housekeeping an engrossing and serious matter.  She is in the
+habit of bringing her domestic difficulties to me when I reach home
+in the evenings, a habit which sometimes renders me unjustly
+indignant.  Most unjustly, for she has borne with me for thirty years
+and is known throughout the entire neighborhood as a perfect
+housekeeper.  I can close my eyes and find any desired article in my
+bedroom at any time.
+
+We passed the Wellses' house on our way to Mrs. Dane's that night,
+and my wife commented on the dark condition of the lower floor.
+
+"Even if they are going out," she said, "it would add to the
+appearance of the street to leave a light or two burning.  But some
+people have no public feeling."
+
+I made no comment, I believe.  The Wellses were a young couple, with
+children, and had been known to observe that they considered the
+neighborhood "stodgy."  And we had retaliated, I regret to say, in
+kind, but not with any real unkindness, by regarding them as
+interlopers.  They drove too many cars, and drove them too fast; they
+kept a governess and didn't see enough of their children; and their
+English butler made our neat maids look commonplace.
+
+There is generally, in every old neighborhood, some one house on
+which is fixed, so to speak, the community gaze, and in our case it
+was on the Arthur Wellses'.  It was a curious, not unfriendly
+staring, much I daresay like that of the old robin who sees two
+young wild canaries building near her.
+
+We passed the house, and went on to Mrs. Dane's.
+
+She had given us no inkling of what we were to have that night, and
+my wife conjectured a conjurer!  She gave me rather a triumphant
+smile when we were received in the library and the doors into the
+drawing-room were seen to be tightly closed.
+
+We were early, as my wife is a punctual person, and soon after our
+arrival Sperry came.  Mrs. Dane was in her chair as usual, with her
+companion in attendance, and when she heard Sperry's voice outside
+she excused herself and was wheeled out to him, and together we
+heard them go into the drawing-room.  When the Robinsons arrived she
+and Sperry reappeared, and we waited for her customary announcement
+of the evening's program.  When none came, even during the meal, I
+confess that my curiosity was almost painful.
+
+I think, looking back, that it was Sperry who turned the talk to the
+supernatural, and that, to the accompaniment of considerable gibing
+by the men, he told a ghost story that set the women to looking back
+over their shoulders into the dark corners beyond the zone of
+candle-light.  All of us, I remember, except Sperry and Mrs. Dane,
+were skeptical as to the supernatural, and Herbert Robinson believed
+that while there were so-called sensitives who actually went into
+trance, the controls which took possession of them were buried
+personalities of their own, released during trance from the
+sub-conscious mind.
+
+"If not," he said truculently, "if they are really spirits, why can't
+they tell us what is going on, not in some vague place where they are
+always happy, but here and now, in the next house?  I don't ask for
+prophecy, but for some evidence of their knowledge.  Are the Germans
+getting ready to fight England?  Is Horace here the gay dog some of
+us suspect?"
+
+As I am the Horace in question, I must explain that Herbert was
+merely being facetious.  My life is a most orderly and decorous one.
+But my wife, unfortunately, lacks a sense of humor, and I felt that
+the remark might have been more fortunate.
+
+"Physical phenomena!" scoffed the cynic.  "I've seen it all--objects
+moving without visible hands, unexplained currents of cold air, voice
+through a trumpet--I know the whole rotten mess, and I've got a book
+which tells how to do all the tricks.  I'll bring it along some night."
+
+Mrs. Dane smiled, and the discussion was dropped for a time.  It was
+during the coffee and cigars that Mrs. Dane made her announcement.
+As Alice Robinson takes an after-dinner cigarette, a custom my wife
+greatly deplores, the ladies had remained with us at the table.
+
+"As a matter of fact, Herbert," she said, "we intend to put your
+skepticism to the test tonight.  Doctor Sperry has found a medium
+for us, a non-professional and a patient of his, and she has kindly
+consented to give us a sitting."
+
+Herbert wheeled and looked at Sperry.
+
+"Hold up your right hand and state by your honor as a member in
+good standing that you have not primed her, Sperry."
+
+Sperry held up his hand.
+
+"Absolutely not," he said, gravely.  "She is coming in my car.  She
+doesn't know to what house or whose.  She knows none of you.  She
+is a stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the
+neighborhood."
+
+
+
+II
+
+
+The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane's chair, as her companion did not
+dine with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors.
+There Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been
+completely metamorphosed.
+
+Mrs. Dane's drawing-room is generally rather painful.  Kindly soul
+that she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit
+there the many gifts of a long lifetime.  Photographs long outgrown,
+onyx tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant
+bric-a-brac usually make the progress of her chair through it a
+precarious and perilous matter.  We paused in the doorway, startled.
+
+The room had been dismantled.  It opened before us, walls and
+chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken
+from the windows.  To emphasize the change, in the center stood a
+common pine table, surrounded by seven plain chairs.  All the
+lights were out save one, a corner bracket, which was screened with
+a red-paper shade.
+
+She watched our faces with keen satisfaction.  "Such a time I had
+doing it!" she said.  "The servants, of course, think I have gone
+mad.  All except Clara.  I told her.  She's a sensible girl."
+
+Herbert chuckled.
+
+"Very neat," he said, "although a chair or two for the spooks would
+have been no more than hospitable.  All right.  Now bring on your
+ghosts."
+
+My wife, however, looked slightly displeased.  "As a church-woman,"
+she said, "I really feel that it is positively impious to bring back
+the souls of the departed, before they are called from on High."
+
+"Oh, rats," Herbert broke in rudely.  "They'll not come.  Don't
+worry.  And if you hear raps, don't worry.  It will probably be the
+medium cracking the joint of her big toe."
+
+There was still a half hour until the medium's arrival.  At Mrs.
+Dane's direction we employed it in searching the room.  It was the
+ordinary rectangular drawing-room, occupying a corner of the house.
+Two windows at the end faced on the street, with a patch of
+railed-in lawn beneath them.  A fire-place with a dying fire and
+flanked by two other windows, occupied the long side opposite the
+door into the hall.  These windows, opening on a garden, were
+closed by outside shutters, now bolted.  The third side was a
+blank wall, beyond which lay the library.  On the fourth side were
+the double doors into the hall.
+
+As, although the results we obtained were far beyond any
+expectations, the purely physical phenomena were relatively
+insignificant, it is not necessary to go further into the detail
+of the room.  Robinson has done that, anyhow, for the Society of
+Psychical Research, a proceeding to which I was opposed, as will
+be understood by the close of the narrative.
+
+Further to satisfy Mrs. Dane, we examined the walls and floor-boards
+carefully, and Herbert, armed with a candle, went down to the cellar
+and investigated from below, returning to announce in a loud voice
+which made us all jump that it seemed all clear enough down there.
+After that we sat and waited, and I daresay the bareness and
+darkness of the room put us into excellent receptive condition.  I
+know that I myself, probably owing to an astigmatism, once or twice
+felt that I saw wavering shadows in corners, and I felt again some
+of the strangeness I had felt during the day.  We spoke in whispers,
+and Alice Robinson recited the history of a haunted house where she
+had visited in England.  But Herbert was still cynical.  He said,
+I remember:
+
+"Here we are, six intelligent persons of above the average grade,
+and in a few minutes our hair will be rising and our pulses
+hammering while a Choctaw Indian control, in atrocious English,
+will tell us she is happy and we are happy and so everybody's
+happy.  Hanky panky!"
+
+"You may be as skeptical as you please, if you will only be fair,
+Herbert," Mrs. Dane said.
+
+"And by that you mean--"
+
+"During the sitting keep an open mind and a closed mouth," she
+replied, cheerfully.
+
+As I said at the beginning, this is not a ghost story.  Parts of
+it we now understand, other parts we do not.  For the physical
+phenomena we have no adequate explanation.  They occurred.  We saw
+and heard them.  For the other part of the seance we have come to
+a conclusion satisfactory to ourselves, a conclusion not reached,
+however, until some of us had gone through some dangerous
+experiences, and had been brought into contact with things hitherto
+outside the orderly progression of our lives.
+
+But at no time, although incredible things happened, did any one
+of us glimpse that strange world of the spirit that seemed so often
+almost within our range of vision.
+
+Miss Jeremy, the medium, was due at 8:30 and at 8:20 my wife assisted
+Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Sperry,
+sent out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and
+carrying a light bamboo rod.
+
+"Don't ask me what they are for," he said to Herbert's grin of
+amusement.  "Every workman has his tools."
+
+Herbert examined the rod, but it was what it appeared to be, and
+nothing else.
+
+Some one had started the phonograph in the library, and it was
+playing gloomily, "Shall we meet beyond the river?"  At Sperry's
+request we stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I
+remember, took a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance,
+and crunched it in his teeth.  Then Miss Jeremy came in.
+
+She was not at all what we had expected.  Twenty-six, I should say,
+and in a black dinner dress.  She seemed like a perfectly normal
+young woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way.  Not much
+personality, perhaps; the very word "medium" precludes that.  A
+"sensitive," I think she called herself.  We were presented to her,
+and but for the stripped and bare room, it might have been any
+evening after any dinner, with bridge waiting.
+
+When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly.  "What a
+strange day it has been!" she said.  "I have been very nervous.  I
+only hope I can do what you want this evening."
+
+"I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy," I replied.
+
+She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor.  Somehow I had
+never thought of a medium with a sense of humor.  I liked her at
+once.  We all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the
+iconoclast, the antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously
+intent eyes.
+
+Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the
+drawing-room doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs.
+Dane's empty wheeled chair across them.
+
+"Anything that comes in," he boasted, "will come through the keyhole
+or down the chimney."
+
+And then, eying the fireplace, he deliberately took a picture from
+the wall and set it on the fender.
+
+Miss Jeremy gave the room only the most casual of glances.
+
+"Where shall I sit?" she asked.
+
+Mrs. Dane indicated her place, and she asked for a small stand to
+be brought in and placed about two feet behind her chair, and two
+chairs to flank it, and then to take the black cloth from the table
+and hang it over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs
+of the chairs.  Thus arranged, the curtain formed a low screen
+behind her, with the stand beyond it.  On this stand we placed, at
+her order, various articles from our pockets--I a fountain pen,
+Sperry a knife; and my wife contributed a gold bracelet.
+
+We all felt, I fancy, rather absurd.  Herbert's smile in the dim
+light became a grin.  "The same old thing!" he whispered to me.
+"Watch her closely.  They do it with a folding rod."
+
+We arranged between us that we were to sit one on each side of her,
+and Sperry warned me not to let go of her hand for a moment.  "They
+have a way of switching hands," he explained in a whisper.  "If she
+wants to scratch her nose I'll scratch it."
+
+We were, we discovered, not to touch the table, but to sit around
+it at a distance of a few inches, holding hands and thus forming the
+circle.  And for twenty minutes we sat thus, and nothing happened.
+She was fully conscious and even spoke once or twice, and at last
+she moved impatiently and told us to put our hands on the table.
+
+I had put my opened watch on the table before me, a night watch with
+a luminous dial.  At five minutes after nine I felt the top of the
+table waver under my fingers, a curious, fluid-like motion.
+
+"The table is going to move," I said.
+
+Herbert laughed, a dry little chuckle.  "Sure it is," he said.
+"When we all get to acting together, it will probably do considerable
+moving.  I feel what you feel.  It's flowing under my fingers."
+
+"Blood," said Sperry.  "You fellows feel the blood moving through
+the ends of your fingers.  That's all.  Don't be impatient."
+
+However, curiously enough, the table did not move.  Instead, my
+watch, before my eyes, slid to the edge of the table and dropped to
+the floor, and almost instantly an object, which we recognized later
+as Sperry's knife, was flung over the curtain and struck the wall
+behind Mrs. Dane violently.
+
+One of the women screamed, ending in a hysterical giggle.  Then we
+heard rhythmic beating on the top of the stand behind the medium.
+Startling as it was at the beginning, increasing as it did from a
+slow beat to an incredibly rapid drumming, when the initial shock
+was over Herbert commenced to gibe.
+
+"Your fountain pen, Horace," he said to me.  "Making out a statement
+for services rendered, by its eagerness."
+
+The answer to that was the pen itself, aimed at him with apparent
+accuracy, and followed by an outcry from him.
+
+"Here, stop it!" he said.  "I've got ink all over me!"
+
+We laughed consumedly.  The sitting had taken on all the attributes
+of practical joking.  The table no longer quivered under my hands.
+
+"Please be sure you are holding my hands tight.  Hold them very
+tight," said Miss Jeremy.  Her voice sounded faint and far away.
+Her head was dropped forward on her chest, and she suddenly sagged
+in her chair.  Sperry broke the circle and coming to her, took her
+pulse.  It was, he reported, very rapid.
+
+"You can move and talk now if you like," he said.  "She's in trance,
+and there will be no more physical demonstrations."
+
+Mrs. Dane was the first to speak.  I was looking for my fountain pen,
+and Herbert was again examining the stand.
+
+"I believe it now," Mrs. Dane said.  "I saw your watch go, Horace,
+but tomorrow I won't believe it at all."
+
+"How about your companion?" I asked.  "Can she take shorthand?  We
+ought to have a record."
+
+"Probably not in the dark."
+
+"We can have some light now," Sperry said.
+
+There was a sort of restrained movement in the room now.  Herbert
+turned on a bracket light, and I moved away the roller chair.
+
+"Go and get Clara, Horace," Mrs. Dane said to me, "and have her
+bring a note-book and pencil."  Nothing, I believe, happened during
+my absence.  Miss Jeremy was sunk in her chair and breathing heavily
+when I came back with Clara, and Sperry was still watching her pulse.
+Suddenly my wife said:
+
+"Why, look!  She's wearing my bracelet!"
+
+This proved to be the case, and was, I regret to say, the cause of
+a most unjust suspicion on my wife's part.  Even today, with all the
+knowledge she possesses, I am certain that Mrs. Johnson believes
+that some mysterious power took my watch and dragged it off the
+table, and threw the pen, but that I myself under cover of darkness
+placed her bracelet on Miss Jeremy's arm.  I can only reiterate here
+what I have told her many times, that I never touched the bracelet
+after it was placed on the stand.
+
+"Take down everything that happens, Clara, and all we say," Mrs.
+Dane said in a low tone.  "Even if it sounds like nonsense, put it
+down."
+
+It is because Clara took her orders literally that I am making this
+more readable version of her script.  There was a certain amount of
+non-pertinent matter which would only cloud the statement if rendered
+word for word, and also certain scattered, unrelated words with which
+many of the statements terminated.  For instance, at the end of the
+sentence, "Just above the ear," came a number of rhymes to the final
+word, "dear, near, fear, rear, cheer, three cheers."  These I have
+cut, for the sake of clearness.
+
+For some five minutes, perhaps, Miss Jeremy breathed stertorously,
+and it was during that interval that we introduced Clara and took
+up our positions.  Sperry sat near the medium now, having changed
+places with Herbert, and the rest of us were as we had been, save
+that we no longer touched hands.  Suddenly Miss Jeremy began to
+breathe more quietly, and to move about in her chair.  Then she
+sat upright.
+
+"Good evening, friends," she said.  "I am glad to see you all again."
+
+I caught Herbert's eye, and he grinned.
+
+"Good evening, little Bright Eyes," he said.  "How's everything in
+the happy hunting ground tonight?"
+
+"Dark and cold," she said. "Dark and cold.  And the knee hurts.
+It's very bad.  If the key is on the nail--Arnica will take the
+pain out."
+
+She lapsed into silence.  In transcribing Clara's record I shall
+make no reference to these pauses, which were frequent, and
+occasionally filled in with extraneous matter.  For instance, once
+there was what amounted to five minutes of Mother Goose jingles.
+Our method was simply one of question, by one of ourselves, and of
+answer by Miss Jeremy.  These replies were usually in a querulous
+tone, and were often apparently unwilling.  Also occasionally there
+was a bit of vernacular, as in the next reply.  Herbert, who was
+still flippantly amused, said:
+
+"Don't bother about your knee.  Give us some local stuff.  Gossip.
+If you can."
+
+"Sure I can, and it will make your hair curl."  Then suddenly there
+was a sort of dramatic pause and then an outburst.
+
+"He's dead."
+
+"Who is dead?" Sperry asked, with his voice drawn a trifle thin.
+
+"A bullet just above the ear.  That's a bad place.  Thank goodness
+there's not much blood.  Cold water will take it out of the carpet.
+Not hot.  Not hot.  Do you want to set the stain?"
+
+"Look here," Sperry said, looking around the table.  "I don't like
+this.  It's darned grisly."
+
+"Oh, fudge!" Herbert put in irreverently.  "Let her rave, or it, or
+whatever it is.  Do you mean that a man is dead?"--to the medium.
+
+"Yes.  She has the revolver.  She needn't cry so.  He was cruel to
+her.  He was a beast.  Sullen."
+
+"Can you see the woman?" I asked.
+
+"If it's sent out to be cleaned it will cause trouble.  Hang it in
+the closet."
+
+Herbert muttered something about the movies having nothing on us,
+and was angrily hushed.  There was something quite outside of Miss
+Jeremy's words that had impressed itself on all of us with a sense
+of unexpected but very real tragedy.  As I look back I believe it
+was a sort of desperation in her voice.  But then came one of
+those interruptions which were to annoy us considerably during the
+series of sittings; she began to recite Childe Harold.
+
+When that was over,
+
+"Now then," Sperry said in a businesslike voice, "you see a dead
+man, and a young woman with him.  Can you describe the room?"
+
+"A small room, his dressing-room.  He was shaving.  There is still
+lather on his face."
+
+"And the woman killed him?"
+
+"I don't know.  Oh, I don't know.  No, she didn't.  He did it!"
+
+"He did it himself?"
+
+There was no answer to that, but a sort of sulky silence.
+
+"Are you getting this, Clara?" Mrs. Dane asked sharply.  "Don't
+miss a word.  Who knows what this may develop into?"
+
+I looked at the secretary, and it was clear that she was terrified.
+I got up and took my chair to her.  Coming back, I picked up my
+forgotten watch from the floor.  It was still going, and the hands
+marked nine-thirty.
+
+"Now," Sperry said in a soothing tone, "you said there was a shot
+fired and a man was killed.  Where was this?  What house?"
+
+"Two shots.  One is in the ceiling of the dressing-room."
+
+"And the other killed him?"
+
+But here, instead of a reply we got the words, "library paste."
+
+Quite without warning the medium groaned, and Sperry believed the
+trance was over.
+
+"She's coming out," he said.  "A glass of wine, somebody."  But she
+did not come out.  Instead, she twisted in the chair.
+
+"He's so heavy to lift," she muttered.  Then: "Get the lather off
+his face.  The lather.  The lather."
+
+She subsided into the chair and began to breathe with difficulty.
+"I want to go out.  I want air.  If I could only go to sleep and
+forget it.  The drawing-room furniture is scattered over the house."
+
+This last sentence she repeated over and over.  It got on our
+nerves, ragged already.
+
+"Can you tell us about the house?"
+
+There was a distinct pause.  Then: "Certainly.  A brick house.  The
+servants' entrance is locked, but the key is on a nail, among the
+vines.  All the furniture is scattered through the house."
+
+"She must mean the furniture of this room," Mrs. Dane whispered.
+
+The remainder of the sitting was chaotic.  The secretary's notes
+consist of unrelated words and often childish verses.  On going
+over the notes the next day, when the stenographic record had been
+copied on a typewriter, Sperry and I found that one word recurred
+frequently.  The word was "curtain."  Of the extraordinary event
+that followed the breaking up of the seance, I have the keenest
+recollection.  Miss Jeremy came out of her trance weak and looking
+extremely ill, and Sperry's motor took her home.  She knew nothing
+of what had happened, and hoped we had been satisfied.  By agreement,
+we did not tell her what had transpired, and she was not curious.
+
+Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave.  We were
+standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the
+lights going full now.
+
+"Well," he said, "it is one of two things.  Either we've been
+gloriously faked, or we've been let in on a very tidy little crime."
+
+It was Mrs. Dane's custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of
+stir-up-cup--nightcap, she calls it--on her evenings, and we found
+it waiting for us in the library.  In the warmth of its open fire,
+and the cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impassiveness
+of the butler, there was something sane and wholesome.  The women of
+the party reacted quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a
+corner desk, intently working over a small object in the palm of
+his hand.
+
+He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.
+
+"Library paste!" he said.  "It rolls into a soft, malleable ball.
+It could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster.
+The paper would paste down over it, too."
+
+"Then you think?"
+
+"I'm not thinking at all.  The thing she described may have taken
+place in Timbuctoo.  May have happened ten years ago.  May be the
+plot of some book she has read."
+
+"On the other hand," I replied, "it is just possible that it was
+here, in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room."
+
+"Have you any idea of the time?"
+
+"I know exactly.  It was half-past nine."
+
+
+
+III
+
+
+At midnight, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the
+phone.  "Be careful, Horace," he said.  "Don't let Mrs. Horace think
+anything has happened.  I want to see you at once.  Suppose you say
+I have a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn."
+
+I listened to sounds from upstairs.  I heard my wife go into her
+room and close the door.
+
+"Tell me something about it," I urged.
+
+"Just this.  Arthur Wells killed himself tonight, shot himself in the
+head.  I want you to go there with me."
+
+"Arthur Wells!"
+
+"Yes.  I say, Horace, did you happen to notice the time the seance
+began tonight?"
+
+"It was five minutes after nine when my watch fell."
+
+"Then it would have been about half past when the trance began?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+There was a silence at Sperry's end of the wire. Then:
+
+"He was shot about 9:30," he said, and rang off.
+
+I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the
+receiver.  A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick.
+And so were all the other houses on the street.  Vines in the back?
+Well, even my own house had vines.  It was absurd; it was pure
+coincidence; it was--well, I felt it was queer.
+
+Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a
+highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all,
+a spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did,
+touching but intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?
+
+I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the
+darkened recesses of the passage.  It seemed to my disordered nerves
+that back of the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the
+heavy curtains, in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy
+forms, invisible when I stared, but advancing a trifle from their
+obscurity when, by turning my head and looking ahead, they impinged
+on the extreme right or left of my field of vision.
+
+I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved.  The Wellses
+had been among us but not of us, as I have said.  They had come,
+like gay young comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing
+behind them their cars and servants, their children and governesses
+and rather riotous friends, and had flashed on us in a sort of
+bright impermanence.
+
+Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur.  His faults were on the
+surface.  He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his
+gambling debts.  But underneath it all there had always been
+something boyishly honest about him.  He had played, it is true,
+through most of the thirty years that now marked his whole life,
+but he could have been made a man by the right woman.  And he had
+married the wrong one.
+
+Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found
+that, as is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own
+sex are rather merciless.  A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my
+wife has characterized her as cold, calculating and ambitious.  She
+has said frequently, too, that Elinor Wells was a disappointed
+woman, that her marriage, while giving her social identity, had
+disappointed her in a monetary way.  Whether that is true or not,
+there was no doubt, by the time they had lived in our neighborhood
+for a year, that a complication had arisen in the shape of another
+man.
+
+My wife, on my return from my office in the evening, had been quite
+likely to greet me with:
+
+"Horace, he has been there all afternoon.  I really think something
+should be done about it."
+
+"Who has been where?" I would ask, I am afraid not too patiently.
+
+"You know perfectly well.  And I think you ought to tell him."
+
+In spite of her vague pronouns, I understood, and in a more
+masculine way I shared her sense of outrage.  Our street has never
+had a scandal on it, except the one when the Berringtons' music
+teacher ran away with their coachman, in the days of carriages.
+And I am glad to say that that is almost forgotten.
+
+Nevertheless, we had realized for some time that the dreaded triangle
+was threatening the repute of our quiet neighborhood, and as I stood
+by the telephone that night I saw that it had come.  More than that,
+it seemed very probable that into this very triangle our peaceful
+Neighborhood Club had been suddenly thrust.
+
+My wife accepted my excuse coldly.  She dislikes intensely the
+occasional outside calls of my profession.  She merely observed,
+however, that she would leave all the lights on until my return.
+"I should think you could arrange things better, Horace," she added.
+"It's perfectly idiotic the way people die at night.  And tonight,
+of all nights!"
+
+I shall have to confess that through all of the thirty years of our
+married life my wife has clung to the belief that I am a bit of a
+dog.  Thirty years of exemplary living have not affected this
+conviction, nor had Herbert's foolish remark earlier in the evening
+helped matters.  But she watched me put on my overcoat without
+further comment.  When I kissed her good-night, however, she turned
+her cheek.
+
+The street, with its open spaces, was a relief after the dark hall.
+I started for Sperry's house, my head bent against the wind, my
+mind on the news I had just heard.  Was it, I wondered, just
+possible that we had for some reason been allowed behind the veil
+which covered poor Wells' last moments?  And, to admit that for a
+moment, where would what we had heard lead us?  Sperry had said he
+had killed himself.  But--suppose he had not?
+
+I realize now, looking back, that my recollection of the other man
+in the triangle is largely colored by the fact that he fell in the
+great war.  At that time I hardly knew him, except as a wealthy and
+self-made man in his late thirties; I saw him now and then, in the
+club playing billiards or going in and out of the Wells house, a
+large, fastidiously dressed man, strong featured and broad
+shouldered, with rather too much manner.  I remember particularly
+how I hated the light spats he affected, and the glaring yellow
+gloves.
+
+A man who would go straight for the thing he wanted, woman or power
+or money.  And get it.
+
+Sperry was waiting on his door-step, and we went on to the Wells
+house.  What with the magnitude of the thing that had happened, and
+our mutual feeling that we were somehow involved in it, we were
+rather silent.  Sperry asked one question, however, "Are you
+certain about the time when Miss Jeremy saw what looks like this
+thing?"
+
+"Certainly.  My watch fell at five minutes after nine.  When it was
+all over, and I picked it up, it was still going, and it was 9:30."
+
+He was silent for a moment.  Then:
+
+"The Wellses' nursery governess telephoned for me at 9:35.  We keep
+a record of the time of all calls."
+
+Sperry is a heart specialist, I think I have said, with offices in
+his house.
+
+And, a block or so farther on: "I suppose it was bound to come.  To
+tell the truth, I didn't think the boy had the courage."
+
+"Then you think he did it?"
+
+"They say so," he said grimly.  And added,--irritably: "Good heavens,
+Horace, we must keep that other fool thing out of our minds."
+
+"Yes," I agreed.  "We must."
+
+Although the Wells house was brilliantly lighted when we reached it,
+we had difficulty in gaining admission.  Whoever were in the house
+were up-stairs, and the bell evidently rang in the deserted kitchen
+or a neighboring pantry.
+
+"We might try the servants' entrance," Sperry said.  Then he
+laughed mirthlessly.
+
+"We might see," he said, "if there's a key on the nail among the
+vines."
+
+I confess to a nervous tightening of my muscles as we made our
+way around the house.  If the key was there, we were on the track
+of a revelation that might revolutionize much that we had held
+fundamental in science and in our knowledge of life itself.  If,
+sitting in Mrs. Dane's quiet room, a woman could tell us what was
+happening in a house a mile or so away, it opened up a new earth.
+Almost a new heaven.
+
+I stopped and touched Sperry's arm.  "This Miss Jeremy--did she
+know Arthur Wells or Elinor?  If she knew the house, and the
+situation between them, isn't it barely possible that she
+anticipated this thing?"
+
+"We knew them," he said gruffly, "and whatever we anticipated, it
+wasn't this."
+
+Sperry had a pocket flash, and when we found the door locked we
+proceeded with our search for the key.  The porch had been covered
+with heavy vines, now dead of the November frosts, and showing,
+here and there, dead and dried leaves that crackled as we touched
+them.  In the darkness something leaped against, me, and I almost
+cried out.  It was, however, only a collie dog, eager for the
+warmth of his place by the kitchen fire.
+
+"Here's the key," Sperry said, and held it out.  The flash wavered
+in his hand, and his voice was strained.
+
+"So far, so good," I replied, and was conscious that my own voice
+rang strange in my ears.
+
+We admitted ourselves, and the dog, bounding past us, gave a sharp
+yelp of gratitude and ran into the kitchen.
+
+"Look here, Sperry," I said, as we stood inside the door, "they
+don't want me here.  They've sent for you, but I'm the most casual
+sort of an acquaintance.  I haven't any business here."
+
+That struck him, too.  We had both been so obsessed with the scene
+at Mrs. Dane's that we had not thought of anything else.
+
+"Suppose you sit down in the library," he said.  "The chances are
+against her coming down, and the servants don't matter."
+
+As a matter of fact, we learned later that all the servants were
+out except the nursery governess.  There were two small children.
+There was a servants' ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the
+butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in.
+Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician
+who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no
+one else in the house but the children, asleep in the nursery.
+
+As I sat alone in the library, the house was perfectly silent.  But
+in some strange fashion it had apparently taken on the attributes
+of the deed that had preceded the silence.  It was sinister,
+mysterious, dark.  Its immediate effect on my imagination was
+apprehension--almost terror.  Murder or suicide, here among the
+shadows a soul, an indestructible thing, had been recently
+violently wrenched from its body.  The body lay in the room overhead.
+But what of the spirit?  I shivered as I thought that it might even
+then be watching me with formless eyes from some dark corner.
+
+Overwrought as I was, I was forced to bring my common sense to bear
+on the situation.  Here was a tragedy, a real and terrible one.
+Suppose we had, in some queer fashion, touched its outer edges that
+night?  Then how was it that there had come, mixed up with so much
+that might be pertinent, such extraneous and grotesque things as
+Childe Harold, a hurt knee, and Mother Goose?
+
+I remember moving impatiently, and trying to argue myself into my
+ordinary logical state of mind, but I know now that even then I
+was wondering whether Sperry had found a hole in the ceiling
+upstairs.
+
+I wandered, I recall, into the realm of the clairvoyant and the
+clairaudient.  Under certain conditions, such as trance, I knew that
+some individuals claimed a power of vision that was supernormal,
+and I had at one time lunched at my club with a well-dressed
+gentleman in a pince nez who said the room was full of people I
+could not see, but who were perfectly distinct to him.  He claimed,
+and I certainly could not refute him, that he saw further into the
+violet of the spectrum than the rest of us, and seemed to consider
+it nothing unusual when an elderly woman, whose description sounded
+much like my great-grand-mother, came and stood behind my chair.
+
+I recall that he said she was stroking my hair, and that following
+that I had a distinctly creepy sensation along my scalp.
+
+Then there were those who claimed that in trance the spirit of the
+medium, giving place to a control, was free to roam whither it
+would, and, although I am not sure of this, that it wandered in the
+fourth dimension.  While I am very vague about the fourth dimension,
+I did know that in it doors and walls were not obstacles.  But as
+they would not be obstacles to a spirit, even in the world as we
+know it, that got me nowhere.
+
+Suppose Sperry came down and said Arthur Wells had been shot above
+the ear, and that there was a second bullet hole in the ceiling?
+Added to the key on the nail, a careless custom and surely not
+common, we would have conclusive proof that our medium had been
+correct.  There was another point, too.  Miss Jeremy had said, "Get
+the lather off his face."
+
+That brought me up with a turn.  Would a man stop shaving to kill
+himself?  If he did, why a revolver?  Why not the razor in his hand?
+
+I knew from my law experience that suicide is either a desperate
+impulse or a cold-blooded and calculated finality.  A man who kills
+himself while dressing comes under the former classification, and
+will usually seize the first method at hand.  But there was
+something else, too.  Shaving is an automatic process.  It completes
+itself.  My wife has an irritated conviction that if the house
+caught fire while I was in the midst of the process, I would complete
+it and rinse the soap from my face before I caught up the
+fire-extinguisher.
+
+Had he killed himself, or had Elinor killed him?  Was she the sort
+to sacrifice herself to a violent impulse?  Would she choose the
+hard way, when there was the easy one of the divorce court?  I
+thought not.  And the same was true of Ellingham.  Here were two
+people, both of them careful of appearance, if not of fact.  There
+was another possibility, too.  That he had learned something while
+he was dressing, had attacked or threatened her with a razor, and
+she had killed him in self-defence.
+
+I had reached that point when Sperry came down the staircase,
+ushering out the detectives and the medical man.  He came to the
+library door and stood looking at me, with his face rather paler
+than usual.
+
+"I'll take you up now," he said.  "She's in her room, in bed, and
+she has had an opiate."
+
+"Was he shot above the ear?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+I did not look at him, nor he at me.  We climbed the stairs and
+entered the room, where, according to Elinor's story, Arthur Wells
+had killed himself.  It was a dressing-room, as Miss Jeremy had
+described.  A wardrobe, a table with books and magazines in
+disorder, two chairs, and a couch, constituted the furnishings.
+Beyond was a bathroom.  On a chair by a window the dead mans's
+evening clothes were neatly laid out, his shoes beneath.  His top
+hat and folded gloves were on the table.
+
+Arthur Wells lay on the couch.  A sheet had been drawn over the
+body, and I did not disturb it.  It gave the impression of unusual
+length that is always found, I think, in the dead, and a breath
+of air from an open window, by stirring the sheet, gave a false
+appearance of life beneath.
+
+The house was absolutely still.
+
+When I glanced at Sperry he was staring at the ceiling, and I
+followed his eyes, but there was no mark on it.  Sperry made a
+little gesture.
+
+"It's queer," he muttered.  "It's--"
+
+"The detective and I put him there.  He was here."  He showed a
+place on the floor midway of the room.
+
+"Where was his head lying?" I asked, cautiously.
+
+"Here."
+
+I stooped and examined the carpet.  It was a dark Oriental, with
+much red in it.  I touched the place, and then ran my folded
+handkerchief over it.  It came up stained with blood.
+
+"There would be no object in using cold water there, so as not to
+set the stain," Sperry said thoughtfully.  "Whether he fell there
+or not, that is where she allowed him to be found."
+
+"You don't think he fell there?"
+
+"She dragged him, didn't she?" he demanded.  Then the strangeness
+of what he was saying struck him, and he smiled foolishly.  "What
+I mean is, the medium said she did.  I don't suppose any jury would
+pass us tonight as entirely sane, Horace," he said.
+
+He walked across to the bathroom and surveyed it from the doorway.
+I followed him.  It was as orderly as the other room.  On a glass
+shelf over the wash-stand were his razors, a safety and, beside it,
+in a black case, an assortment of the long-bladed variety, one for
+each day of the week, and so marked.
+
+Sperry stood thoughtfully in the doorway.
+
+"The servants are out," he said.  "According to Elinor's statement
+he was dressing when he did it.  And yet some one has had a wild
+impulse for tidiness here, since it happened.  Not a towel out of
+place!"
+
+It was in the bathroom that he told me Elinor's story.  According
+to her, it was a simple case of suicide.  And she was honest about
+it, in her own way.  She was shocked, but she was not pretending
+any wild grief.  She hadn't wanted him to die, but she had not felt
+that they could go on much longer together.  There had been no
+quarrel other than their usual bickering.  They had been going to
+a dance that night.  The servants had all gone out immediately after
+dinner to a servants' ball and the governess had gone for a walk.
+She was to return at nine-thirty to fasten Elinor's gown and to be
+with the children.
+
+Arthur, she said, had been depressed for several days, and at
+dinner had hardly spoken at all.  He had not, however, objected to
+the dance.  He had, indeed, seemed strangely determined to go,
+although she had pleaded a headache.  At nine o'clock he went
+upstairs, apparently to dress.
+
+She was in her room, with the door shut, when she heard a shot.
+She ran in and found him lying on the floor of his dressing-room
+with his revolver behind him.  The governess was still out.  The
+shot had roused the children, and they had come down from the
+nursery above.  She was frantic, but she had to soothe them.  The
+governess, however, came in almost immediately, and she had sent
+her to the telephone to summon help, calling Sperry first of all,
+and then the police.
+
+"Have you seen the revolver?" I asked.
+
+"Yes.  It's all right, apparently.  Only one shot had been fired."
+
+"How soon did they get a doctor?"
+
+"It must have been some time.  They gave up telephoning, and the
+governess went out, finally, and found one."
+
+"Then, while she was out--?"
+
+"Possibly," Sperry said.  "If we start with the hypothesis that
+she was lying."
+
+"If she cleaned up here for any reason," I began, and commenced
+a desultory examination of the room.  Just why I looked behind
+the bathtub forces me to an explanation I am somewhat loath to
+make, but which will explain a rather unusual proceeding.  For
+some time my wife has felt that I smoked too heavily, and out of
+her solicitude for me has limited me to one cigar after dinner.
+But as I have been a heavy smoker for years I have found this a
+great hardship, and have therefore kept a reserve store, by
+arrangement with the housemaid, behind my tub.  In self-defence
+I must also state that I seldom have recourse to such stealthy
+measures.
+
+Believing then that something might possibly be hidden there, I
+made an investigation, and could see some small objects lying
+there.  Sperry brought me a stick from the dressing-room, and
+with its aid succeeded in bringing out the two articles which were
+instrumental in starting us on our brief but adventurous careers
+as private investigators.  One was a leather razor strop, old and
+stiff from disuse, and the other a wet bath sponge, now stained
+with blood to a yellowish brown.
+
+"She is lying, Sperry," I said.  "He fell somewhere else, and she
+dragged him to where he was found."
+
+"But--why?"
+
+"I don't know," I said impatiently.  "From some place where a man
+would be unlikely to kill himself, I daresay.  No one ever killed
+himself, for instance, in an open hallway.  Or stopped shaving to
+do it."
+
+"We have only Miss Jeremy's word for that," he said, sullenly.
+"Confound it, Horace, don't let's bring in that stuff if we can
+help it."
+
+We stared at each other, with the strop and the sponge between us.
+Suddenly he turned on his heel and went back into the room, and a
+moment later he called me, quietly.
+
+"You're right," he said.  "The poor devil was shaving.  He had it
+half done.  Come and look."
+
+But I did not go.  There was a carafe of water in the bathroom, and
+I took a drink from it.  My hands were shaking.  When I turned
+around I found Sperry in the hall, examining the carpet with his
+flash light, and now and then stooping to run his hand over the
+floor.
+
+"Nothing here," he said in a low tone, when I had joined him.  "At
+least I haven't found anything."
+
+
+
+IV
+
+
+How much of Sperry's proceeding with the carpet the governess had
+seen I do not know.  I glanced up and she was there, on the staircase
+to the third floor, watching us.  I did not know, then, whether she
+recognized me or not, for the Wellses' servants were as oblivious of
+the families on the street as their employers.  But she knew Sperry,
+and was ready enough to talk to him.
+
+"How is she now?" she asked.
+
+"She is sleeping, Mademoiselle."
+
+"The children also."
+
+She came down the stairs, a lean young Frenchwoman in a dark dressing
+gown, and Sperry suggested that she too should have an opiate.  She
+seized at the idea, but Sperry did not go down at once for his
+professional bag.
+
+"You were not here when it occurred, Mademoiselle?" he inquired.
+
+"No, doctor.  I had been out for a walk."  She clasped her hands.
+"When I came back--"
+
+"Was he still on the floor of the dressing-room when you came in?"
+
+"But yes.  Of course.  She was alone.  She could not lift him."
+
+"I see," Sperry said thoughtfully.  "No, I daresay she couldn't.
+Was the revolver on the floor also?"
+
+"Yes, doctor.  I myself picked it up."
+
+To Sperry she showed, I observed, a slight deference, but when she
+glanced at me, as she did after each reply, I thought her expression
+slightly altered.  At the time this puzzled me, but it was explained
+when Sperry started down the stairs.
+
+"Monsieur is of the police?" she asked, with a Frenchwoman's timid
+respect for the constabulary.
+
+I hesitated before I answered.  I am a truthful man, and I hate
+unnecessary lying.  But I ask consideration of the circumstances.
+Neither then nor at any time later was the solving of the Wells
+mystery the prime motive behind the course I laid out and
+consistently followed.  I felt that we might be on the verge of some
+great psychic discovery, one which would revolutionize human thought
+and to a certain extent human action.  And toward that end I was
+prepared to go to almost any length.
+
+"I am making a few investigations," I told her.  "You say Mrs. Wells
+was alone in the house, except for her husband?"
+
+"The children."
+
+"Mr. Wells was shaving, I believe, when the--er--impulse overtook him?"
+
+There was no doubt as to her surprise.  "Shaving?  I think not."
+
+"What sort of razor did he ordinarily use?"
+
+"A safety razor always.  At least I have never seen any others around."
+
+"There is a case of old-fashioned razors in the bathroom."
+
+She glanced toward the room and shrugged her shoulders.  "Possibly
+he used others.  I have not seen any."
+
+"It was you, I suppose, who cleaned up afterwards."
+
+"Cleaned up?"
+
+"You who washed up the stains."
+
+"Stains?  Oh, no, monsieur.  Nothing of the sort has yet been done."
+
+I felt that she was telling the truth, so far as she knew it, and I
+then asked about the revolver.
+
+"Do you know where Mr. Wells kept his revolver?"
+
+"When I first came it was in the drawer of that table.  I suggested
+that it be placed beyond the children's reach.  I do not know where
+it was put."
+
+"Do you recall how you left the front door when you went out?  I
+mean, was it locked?"
+
+"No.  The servants were out, and I knew there would be no one to admit
+me.  I left it unfastened."
+
+But it was evident that she had broken a rule of the house by doing
+so, for she added: "I am afraid to use the servants' entrance.  It
+is dark there."
+
+"The key is always hung on the nail when they are out?"
+
+"Yes.  If any one of them is out it is left there.  There is only
+one key.  The family is out a great deal, and it saves bringing some
+one down from the servants' rooms at the top of the house."
+
+But I think my knowledge of the key bothered her, for some reason.
+And as I read over my questions, certainly they indicated a suspicion
+that the situation was less simple than it appeared.  She shot a
+quick glance at me.
+
+"Did you examine the revolver when you picked it up?"
+
+"I, monsieur?  Non!"  Then her fears, whatever they were, got the
+best of her.  "I know nothing but what I tell you.  I was out.  I
+can prove that that is so.  I went to a pharmacy; the clerk will
+remember.  I will go with you, monsieur, and he will tell you that
+I used the telephone there."
+
+I daresay my business of cross-examination, of watching evidence
+helped me to my next question.
+
+"You went out to telephone when there is a telephone in the house?"
+
+But here again, as once or twice before, a veil dropped between us.
+She avoided my eyes.  "There are things one does not want the family
+to hear," she muttered.  Then, having determined on a course of
+action, she followed it.  "I am looking for another position.  I do
+not like it here.  The children are spoiled.  I only came for a
+month's trial."
+
+"And the pharmacy?"
+
+"Elliott's, at the corner of State Avenue and McKee Street."
+
+I told her that it would not be necessary for her to go to the
+pharmacy, and she muttered something about the children and went
+up the stairs.  When Sperry came back with the opiate she was
+nowhere in sight, and he was considerably annoyed.
+
+"She knows something," I told him.  "She is frightened."
+
+Sperry eyed me with a half frown.
+
+"Now see here, Horace," he said, "suppose we had come in here,
+without the thought of that seance behind us?  We'd have accepted
+the thing as it appears to be, wouldn't we?  There may be a dozen
+explanations for that sponge, and for the razor strop.  What in
+heaven's name has a razor strop to do with it anyhow?  One bullet
+was fired, and the revolver has one empty chamber.  It may not be
+the custom to stop shaving in order to commit suicide, but that's
+no argument that it can't be done, and as to the key--how do I
+know that my own back door key isn't hung outside on a nail
+sometimes?"
+
+"We might look again for that hole in the ceiling."
+
+"I won't do it.  Miss Jeremy has read of something of that sort, or
+heard of it, and stored it in her subconscious mind."
+
+But he glanced up at the ceiling nevertheless, and a moment later
+had drawn up a chair and stepped onto it, and I did the same thing.
+We presented, I imagine, rather a strange picture, and I know that
+the presence of the rigid figure on the couch gave me a sort of
+ghoulish feeling.
+
+The house was an old one, and in the center of the high ceiling a
+plaster ornament surrounded the chandelier.  Our search gradually
+centered on this ornament, but the chairs were low and our
+long-distance examination revealed nothing.  It was at that time,
+too, that we heard some one in the lower hall, and we had only a
+moment to put our chairs in place before the butler came in.  He
+showed no surprise, but stood looking at the body on the couch, his
+thin face working.
+
+"I met the detectives outside, doctor," he said.  "It's a terrible
+thing, sir, a terrible thing."
+
+"I'd keep the other servants out of this room, Hawkins."
+
+"Yes, sir."  He went over to the sheet, lifted the edge slowly, and
+then replaced it, and tip-toed to the door.  "The others are not back
+yet.  I'll admit them, and get them up quietly.  How is Mrs. Wells?"
+
+"Sleeping," Sperry said briefly, and Hawkins went out.
+
+I realize now that Sperry was--I am sure he will forgive this--in
+a state of nerves that night.  For example, he returned only an
+impatient silence to my doubt as to whether Hawkins had really only
+just returned and he quite missed something downstairs which I later
+proved to have an important bearing on the case.  This was when we
+were going out, and after Hawkins had opened the front door for us.
+It had been freezing hard, and Sperry, who has a bad ankle, looked
+about for a walking stick.  He found one, and I saw Hawkins take a
+swift step forward, and then stop, with no expression whatever in
+his face.
+
+"This will answer, Hawkins."
+
+"Yes, sir," said Hawkins impassively.
+
+And if I realize that Sperry was nervous that night, I also realize
+that he was fighting a battle quite his own, and with its personal
+problems.
+
+"She's got to quit this sort of thing," he said savagely and apropos
+of nothing, as we walked along.  "It's hard on her, and besides--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"She couldn't have learned about it," he said, following his own
+trail of thought.  "My car brought her from her home to the
+house-door.  She was brought in to us at once.  But don't you see
+that if there are other developments, to prove her statements she
+--well, she's as innocent as a child, but take Herbert, for
+instance.  Do you suppose he'll believe she had no outside
+information?"
+
+"But it was happening while we were shut in the drawing-room."
+
+"So Elinor claims.  But if there was anything to hide, it would have
+taken time.  An hour or so, perhaps.  You can see how Herbert would
+jump on that."
+
+We went back, I remember, to speaking of the seance itself, and to
+the safer subject of the physical phenomena.  As I have said, we did
+not then know of those experimenters who claim that the medium can
+evoke so-called rods of energy, and that by its means the invisible
+"controls" can perform their strange feats of levitation and the
+movement of solid bodies.  Sperry touched very lightly on the spirit
+side.
+
+"At least it would mean activity," he said.  "The thought of an
+inert eternity is not bearable."
+
+He was inclined, however, to believe that there were laws of which
+we were still in ignorance, and that we might some day find and use
+the fourth dimension.  He seemed to be able to grasp it quite clearly.
+"The cube of the cube, or hypercube," he explained.  "Or get it this
+way: a cone passed apex-downward through a plane."
+
+"I know," I said, "that it is perfectly simple.  But somehow it just
+sounds like words to me."
+
+"It's perfectly clear, Horace," he insisted.  "But remember this
+when you try to work it out; it is necessary to use motion as a
+translator of time into space, or of space into time."
+
+"I don't intend to work it out," I said irritably.  "But I mean to
+use motion as a translator of the time, which is 1:30 in the morning,
+to take me to a certain space, which is where I live."
+
+But as it happened, I did not go into my house when I reached it.
+I was wide awake, and I perceived, on looking up at my wife's windows,
+that the lights were out.  As it is her custom to wait up for me on
+those rare occasions when I spend an evening away from home, I
+surmised that she was comfortably asleep, and made my way to the
+pharmacy to which the Wellses' governess had referred.
+
+The night-clerk was in the prescription-room behind the shop.  He
+had fixed himself comfortably on two chairs, with an old table-cover
+over his knee and a half-empty bottle of sarsaparilla on a wooden
+box beside him.  He did not waken until I spoke to him.
+
+"Sorry to rouse you, Jim," I said.
+
+He flung off the cover and jumped up, upsetting the bottle, which
+trickled a stale stream to the floor.  "Oh, that's all right, Mr.
+Johnson, I wasn't asleep, anyhow."
+
+I let that go, and went at once to the object of our visit.  Yes,
+he remembered the governess, knew her, as a matter of fact.  The
+Wellses' bought a good many things there.  Asked as to her
+telephoning, he thought it was about nine o'clock, maybe earlier.
+But questioned as to what she had telephoned about, he drew himself
+up.
+
+"Oh, see here," he said.  "I can't very well tell you that, can I?
+This business has got ethics, all sorts of ethics."
+
+He enlarged on that.  The secrets of the city, he maintained loftily,
+were in the hands of the pharmacies.  It was a trust that they kept.
+"Every trouble from dope to drink, and then some," he boasted.
+
+When I told him that Arthur Wells was dead his jaw dropped, but
+there was no more argument in him.  He knew very well the number the
+governess had called.
+
+"She's done it several times," he said.  "I'll be frank with you.  I
+got curious after the third evening, and called it myself.  You know
+the trick.  I found out it was the Ellingham, house, up State Street."
+
+"What was the nature of the conversations?"
+
+"Oh, she was very careful.  It's an open phone and any one could
+hear her.  Once she said somebody was not to come.  Another time
+she just said, 'This is Suzanne Gautier.  9:30, please.'"
+
+"And tonight?"
+
+"That the family was going out--not to call."
+
+When I told him it was a case of suicide, his jaw dropped.
+
+"Can you beat it?" he said.  "I ask you, can you beat it?  A fellow
+who had everything!"
+
+But he was philosophical, too.
+
+"A lot of people get the bug once in a while," he said.  "They come
+in here for a dose of sudden death, and it takes watching.  You'd
+be surprised the number of things that will do the trick if you take
+enough.  I don't know.  If things get to breaking wrong--"
+
+His voice trailed off, and he kicked at the old table cover on the
+floor.
+
+"It's a matter of the point of view," he said more cheerfully.
+"And my point of view just now is that this place is darned cold,
+and so's the street.  You'd better have a little something to
+warm you up before you go out, Mr. Johnson."
+
+I was chilled through, to tell the truth, and although I rarely
+drink anything I went back with him and took an ounce or two of
+villainous whiskey, poured out of a jug into a graduated glass.
+It is with deep humiliation of spirit I record that a housemaid
+coming into my library at seven o'clock the next morning, found me,
+in top hat and overcoat, asleep on the library couch.
+
+I had, however, removed my collar and tie, and my watch, carefully
+wound, was on the smoking-stand beside me.
+
+The death of Arthur Wells had taken place on Monday evening.
+Tuesday brought nothing new.  The coroner was apparently satisfied,
+and on Wednesday the dead man's body was cremated.
+
+"Thus obliterating all evidence," Sperry said, with what I felt was
+a note of relief.
+
+But I think the situation was bothering him, and that he hoped to
+discount in advance the second sitting by Miss Jeremy, which Mrs.
+Dane had already arranged for the following Monday, for on
+Wednesday afternoon, following a conversation over the telephone,
+Sperry and I had a private sitting with Miss Jeremy in Sperry's
+private office.  I took my wife into our confidence and invited
+her to be present, but the unfortunate coldness following the
+housemaid's discovery of me asleep in the library on the morning
+after the murder, was still noticeable and she refused.
+
+The sitting, however, was totally without value.  There was
+difficulty on the medium's part in securing the trance condition,
+and she broke out once rather petulantly, with the remark that we
+were interfering with her in some way.
+
+I noticed that Sperry had placed Arthur Wells's stick unobtrusively
+on his table, but we secured only rambling and non-pertinent replies
+to our questions, and whether it was because I knew that outside it
+was broad day, or because the Wells matter did not come up at all I
+found a total lack of that sense of the unknown which made all the
+evening sittings so grisly.
+
+I am sure she knew we had wanted something, and that she had failed
+to give it to us, for when she came out she was depressed and in a
+state of lowered vitality.
+
+"I'm afraid I'm not helping you," she said.  "I'm a little tired,
+I think."
+
+She was tired.  I felt suddenly very sorry for her.  She was so
+pretty and so young--only twenty-six or thereabouts--to be in the
+grip of forces so relentless.  Sperry sent her home in his car, and
+took to pacing the floor of his office.
+
+"I'm going to give it up, Horace," he said.  "Perhaps you are right.
+We may be on the verge of some real discovery.  But while I'm
+interested, so interested that it interferes with my work, I'm
+frankly afraid to go on.  There are several reasons."
+
+I argued with him.  There could be no question that if things were
+left as they were, a number of people would go through life convinced
+that Elinor Wells had murdered her husband.  Look at the situation.
+She had sent out all the servants and the governess, surely an
+unusual thing in an establishment of that sort.  And Miss Jeremy
+had been vindicated in three points; some stains had certainly been
+washed up, we had found the key where she had stated it to be, and
+Arthur had certainly been shaving himself.
+
+"In other words," I argued, "we can't stop, Sperry.  You can't stop.
+But my idea would be that our investigations be purely scientific
+and not criminal."
+
+"Also, in other words," he said, "you think we will discover
+something, so you suggest that we compound a felony and keep it to
+ourselves!"
+
+"Exactly," I said drily.
+
+It is of course possible that my nerves were somewhat unstrung
+during the days that followed.  I wakened one night to a terrific
+thump which shook my bed, and which seemed to be the result of
+some one having struck the foot-board with a plank.  Immediately
+following this came a sharp knocking on the antique bed-warmer
+which hangs beside my fireplace.  When I had sufficiently
+recovered my self-control I turned on my bedside lamp, but the
+room was empty.
+
+Again I wakened with a feeling of intense cold.  I was frozen with
+it, and curiously enough it was an inner cold.  It seemed to have
+nothing to do with the surface of my body.  I have no explanation
+to make of these phenomena.  Like the occurrences at the seance,
+they were, and that was all.
+
+But on Thursday night of that week my wife came into my bedroom,
+and stated flatly that there were burglars in the house.
+
+Now it has been my contention always that if a burglar gains
+entrance, he should be allowed to take what he wants.  Silver can
+be replaced, but as I said to my wife then, Horace Johnson could
+not.  But she had recently acquired a tea set formerly belonging
+to her great-grandmother, and apprehension regarding it made her,
+for the nonce, less solicitous for me than usual.
+
+"Either you go or I go," she said.  "Where's your revolver?"
+
+I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs.  But I must
+confess that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably
+less trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to
+the darkness itself.  Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom,
+and there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower
+hall.
+
+We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric
+light.  I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs
+the one I had lighted went out.  I was terrified.  I tried to
+light another match, but there was a draft from somewhere, and it
+too was extinguished before I had had time to glance about.  I was
+immediately conscious of a sort of soft movement around me, as of
+shadowy shapes that passed and repassed.  Once it seemed to me
+that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not lifted, but instead
+dissolved into the other shadows around.  The sudden striking of
+the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization.  I
+turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by
+ghostly hands that came toward me from between the spindles of
+the stair-rail.
+
+At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself.  I
+found that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the
+soft movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.
+
+Probably.  I was not certain.  Indeed, I was certain of nothing
+during those strange days.  I had built up for myself a universe
+upheld by certain laws, of day and night, of food and sleep and
+movement, of three dimensions of space.  And now, it seemed to me,
+I had stood all my life but on the threshold, and, for an hour or
+so, the door had opened.
+
+Sperry had, I believe, told Herbert Robinson of what we had
+discovered, but nothing had been said to the women.  I knew through
+my wife that they were wildly curious, and the night of the second
+seance Mrs. Dane drew me aside and I saw that she suspected, without
+knowing, that we had been endeavoring to check up our revelations
+with the facts.
+
+"I want you to promise me one thing," she said.  "I'll not bother
+you now.  But I'm an old woman, with not much more of life to be
+influenced by any disclosures.  When this thing is over, and you
+have come to a conclusion--I'll not put it that way: you may not
+come to a conclusion--but when it is over, I want you to tell me
+the whole story.  Will you?"
+
+I promised that I would.
+
+Miss Jeremy did not come to dinner.  She never ate before a seance.
+And although we tried to keep the conversational ball floating
+airily, there was not the usual effervescence of the Neighborhood
+Club dinners.  One and all, we were waiting, we knew not for what.
+
+I am sorry to record that there were no physical phenomena of any
+sort at this second seance.  The room was arranged as it had been
+at the first sitting, except that a table with a candle and a chair
+had been placed behind a screen for Mrs. Dane's secretary.
+
+There was one other change.  Sperry had brought the walking-stick
+he had taken from Arthur Wells's room, and after the medium was
+in trance he placed it on the table before her.
+
+The first questions were disappointing in results.  Asked about
+the stick, there was only silence.  When, however, Sperry went
+back to the sitting of the week before, and referred to questions
+and answers at that time, the medium seemed uneasy.  Her hand,
+held under mine, made an effort to free itself and, released,
+touched the cane.  She lifted it, and struck the table a hard
+blow with it.
+
+"Do you know to whom that stick belongs?"
+
+A silence.  Then: "Yes."
+
+"Will you tell us what you know about it?"
+
+"It is writing."
+
+"Writing?"
+
+"It was writing, but the water washed it away."
+
+Then, instantly and with great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of
+words and incomplete sentences.  It is inarticulate, and the
+secretary made no record of it.  As I recall, however, it was about
+water, children, and the words "ten o'clock" repeated several times.
+
+"Do you mean that something happened at ten o'clock?"
+
+"No.  Certainly not.  No, indeed.  The water washed it away.  All
+of it.  Not a trace."
+
+"Where did all this happen?"
+
+She named, without hesitation, a seaside resort about fifty miles
+from our city.  There was not one of us, I dare say, who did not
+know that the Wellses had spent the preceding summer there and that
+Charlie Ellingham had been there, also.
+
+"Do you know that Arthur Wells is dead?"
+
+"Yes.  He is dead."
+
+"Did he kill himself?"
+
+"You can't catch me on that.  I don't know."
+
+Here the medium laughed.  It was horrible.  And the laughter made
+the whole thing absurd.  But it died away quickly.
+
+"If only the pocketbook was not lost," she said.  "There were so
+many things in it.  Especially car-tickets.  Walking is a nuisance."
+
+Mrs. Dane's secretary suddenly spoke.  "Do you want me to take things
+like that?" she asked.
+
+"Take everything, please," was the answer.
+
+"Car-tickets and letters.  It will be terrible if the letters are
+found."
+
+"Where was the pocketbook lost?" Sperry asked.
+
+"If that were known, it could be found," was the reply, rather
+sharply given.  "Hawkins may have it.  He was always hanging around.
+The curtain was much safer."
+
+"What curtain?"
+
+"Nobody would have thought of the curtain.  First ideas are best."
+
+She repeated this, following it, as once before, with rhymes for the
+final word, best, rest, chest, pest.
+
+"Pest!" she said.  "That's Hawkins!"  And again the laughter.
+
+"Did one of the bullets strike the ceiling?"
+
+"Yes.  But you'll never find it.  It is holding well.  That part's
+safe enough--unless it made a hole in the floor above."
+
+"But there was only one empty chamber in the revolver.  How could
+two shots have been fired?"
+
+There was no answer at all to this.  And Sperry, after waiting, went
+on to his next question: "Who occupied the room overhead?"
+
+But here we received the reply to the previous question: "There was
+a box of cartridges in the table-drawer.  That's easy."
+
+From that point, however, the interest lapsed.  Either there was no
+answer to questions, or we got the absurdity that we had encountered
+before, about the drawing-room furniture.  But, unsatisfactory in
+many ways as the seance had been, the effect on Miss Jeremy was
+profound--she was longer in coming out, and greatly exhausted
+when it was all over.
+
+She refused to take the supper Mrs. Dane had prepared for her, and
+at eleven o'clock Sperry took her home in his car.
+
+I remember that Mrs. Dane inquired, after she had gone.
+
+"Does any one know the name of the Wellses' butler?  Is it Hawkins?"
+
+I said nothing, and as Sperry was the only one likely to know and he
+had gone, the inquiry went no further.  Looking back, I realize that
+Herbert, while less cynical, was still skeptical, that his sister
+was non-committal, but for some reason watching me, and that Mrs.
+Dane was in a state of delightful anticipation.
+
+My wife, however, had taken a dislike to Miss Jeremy, and said that
+the whole thing bored her.
+
+"The men like it, of course," she said, "Horace fairly simpers
+with pleasure while he sits and holds her hand.  But a woman doesn't
+impose on other women so easily.  It's silly."
+
+"My dear," Mrs. Dane said, reaching over and patting my wife's hand,
+"people talked that way about Columbus and Galileo.  And if it is
+nonsense it is such thrilling nonsense!"
+
+
+VI
+
+
+I find that the solution of the Arthur Wells mystery--for we did
+solve it--takes three divisions in my mind.  Each one is a sitting,
+followed by an investigation made by Sperry and myself.
+
+But for some reason, after Miss Jeremy's second sitting, I found
+that my reasoning mind was stronger than my credulity.  And as
+Sperry had at that time determined to have nothing more to do with
+the business, I made a resolution to abandon my investigations.
+Nor have I any reason to believe that I would have altered my
+attitude toward the case, had it not been that I saw in the morning
+paper on the Thursday following the second seance, that Elinor
+Wells had closed her house, and gone to Florida.
+
+I tried to put the fact out of my mind that morning.  After all,
+what good would it do?  No discovery of mine could bring Arthur
+Wells back to his family, to his seat at the bridge table at the
+club, to his too expensive cars and his unpaid bills.  Or to his
+wife who was not grieving for him.
+
+On the other hand, I confess to an overwhelming desire to examine
+again the ceiling of the dressing room and thus to check up one
+degree further the accuracy of our revelations.  After some
+debate, therefore, I called up Sperry, but he flatly refused to
+go on any further.
+
+"Miss Jeremy has been ill since Monday," he said.  "Mrs. Dane's
+rheumatism is worse, her companion is nervously upset, and your
+own wife called me up an hour ago and says you are sleeping with
+a light, and she thinks you ought to go away.  The whole club is
+shot to pieces."
+
+But, although I am a small and not a courageous man, the desire
+to examine the Wells house clung to me tenaciously.  Suppose
+there were cartridges in his table drawer?  Suppose I should
+find the second bullet hole in the ceiling?  I no longer deceived
+myself by any argument that my interest was purely scientific.
+There is a point at which curiosity becomes unbearable, when it
+becomes an obsession, like hunger.  I had reached that point.
+
+Nevertheless, I found it hard to plan the necessary deception to
+my wife.  My habits have always been entirely orderly and regular.
+My wildest dissipation was the Neighborhood Club.  I could not
+recall an evening away from home in years, except on business.
+Yet now I must have a free evening, possibly an entire night.
+
+In planning for this, I forgot my nervousness for a time.  I
+decided finally to tell my wife that an out-of-town client wished
+to talk business with me, and that day, at luncheon--I go home to
+luncheon--I mentioned that such a client was in town.
+
+"It is possible," I said, as easily as I could, "that we may not
+get through this afternoon.  If things should run over into the
+evening, I'll telephone."
+
+She took it calmly enough, but later on, as I was taking an
+electric flash from the drawer of the hall table and putting it
+in my overcoat pocket, she came on me, and I thought she looked
+surprised.
+
+During the afternoon I was beset with doubts and uneasiness.
+Suppose she called up my office and found that the client I had
+named was not in town?  It is undoubtedly true that a tangled web
+we weave when first we practise to deceive, for on my return to
+the office I was at once quite certain that Mrs. Johnson would
+telephone and make the inquiry.
+
+After some debate I called my secretary and told her to say, if
+such a message came in, that Mr. Forbes was in town and that I had
+an appointment with him.  As a matter of fact, no such inquiry came
+in, but as Miss Joyce, my secretary, knew that Mr. Forbes was in
+Europe, I was conscious for some months afterwards that Miss Joyce's
+eyes occasionally rested on me in a speculative and suspicious manner.
+
+Other things also increased my uneasiness as the day wore on.  There
+was, for instance, the matter of the back door to the Wells house.
+Nothing was more unlikely than that the key would still be hanging
+there.  I must, therefore, get a key.
+
+At three o'clock I sent the office-boy out for a back-door key.  He
+looked so surprised that I explained that we had lost our key, and
+that I required an assortment of keys of all sizes.
+
+"What sort of key?" he demanded, eyeing me, with his feet apart.
+
+"Just an ordinary key," I said.  "Not a Yale key.  Nothing fancy.
+Just a plain back-door key."  At something after four my wife
+called up, in great excitement.  A boy and a man had been to the
+house and had fitted an extra key to the back door, which had two
+excellent ones already.  She was quite hysterical, and had sent
+for the police, but the officer had arrived after they had gone.
+
+"They are burglars, of course!" she said.  "Burglars often have
+boys with them, to go through the pantry windows.  I'm so nervous
+I could scream."
+
+I tried to tell her that if the door was unlocked there was no
+need to use the pantry window, but she rang off quickly and, I
+thought, coldly.  Not, however, before she had said that my plan
+to spend the evening out was evidently known in the underworld!
+
+By going through my desk I found a number of keys, mostly trunk
+keys and one the key to a dog-collar.  But late in the afternoon I
+visited a client of mine who is in the hardware business, and
+secured quite a selection.  One of them was a skeleton key.  He
+persisted in regarding the matter as a joke, and poked me between
+the shoulder-blades as I went out.
+
+"If you're arrested with all that hardware on you," he said, "you'll
+be held as a first-class burglar.  You are equipped to open anything
+from a can of tomatoes to the missionary box in church."
+
+But I felt that already, innocent as I was, I was leaving a trail of
+suspicion behind me: Miss Joyce and the office boy, the dealer and
+my wife.  And I had not started yet.
+
+I dined in a small chop-house where I occasionally lunch, and took a
+large cup of strong black coffee.  When I went out into the night
+again I found that a heavy fog had settled down, and I began to feel
+again something of the strange and disturbing quality of the day
+which had ended in Arthur Wells's death.  Already a potential
+housebreaker, I avoided policemen, and the very jingling of the keys
+in my pocket sounded loud and incriminating to my ears.
+
+The Wells house was dark.  Even the arc-lamp in the street was
+shrouded in fog.  But the darkness, which added to my nervousness,
+added also to my security.
+
+I turned and felt my way cautiously to the rear of the house.
+Suddenly I remembered the dog.  But of course he was gone.  As I
+cautiously ascended the steps the dead leaves on the vines
+rattled, as at the light touch of a hand, and I was tempted to
+turn and run.
+
+I do not like deserted houses.  Even in daylight they have a
+sinister effect on me.  They seem, in their empty spaces, to have
+held and recorded all that has happened in the dusty past.  The
+Wells house that night, looming before me, silent and mysterious,
+seemed the embodiment of all the deserted houses I had known.  Its
+empty and unshuttered windows were like blind eyes, gazing in, not
+out.
+
+Nevertheless, now that the time had come a certain amount of
+courage came with it.  I am not ashamed to confess that a certain
+part of it came from the anticipation of the Neighborhood Club's
+plaudits.  For Herbert to have made such an investigation, or even
+Sperry, with his height and his iron muscles, would not have
+surprised them.  But I was aware that while they expected
+intelligence and even humor, of a sort, from me, they did not
+anticipate any particular bravery.
+
+The flash was working, but rather feebly.  I found the nail where
+the door-key had formerly hung, but the key, as I had expected,
+was gone.  I was less than five minutes, I fancy, in finding a
+key from my collection that would fit.  The bolt slid back with
+a click, and the door opened.
+
+It was still early in the evening, eight-thirty or thereabouts.  I
+tried to think of that; to remember that, only a few blocks away,
+some of my friends were still dining, or making their way into
+theaters.  But the silence of the house came out to meet me on the
+threshold, and its blackness enveloped me like a wave.  It was
+unfortunate, too, that I remembered just then that it was, or soon
+would be, the very hour of young Wells's death.
+
+Nevertheless, once inside the house, the door to the outside closed
+and facing two alternatives, to go on with it or to cut and run, I
+found a sort of desperate courage, clenched my teeth, and felt for
+the nearest light switch.
+
+The electric light had been cut off!
+
+I should have expected it, but I had not.  I remember standing in
+the back hall and debating whether to go on or to get out.  I was
+not only in a highly nervous state, but I was also badly handicapped.
+However, as the moments wore on and I stood there, with the quiet
+unbroken by no mysterious sounds, I gained a certain confidence.
+After a short period of readjustment, therefore, I felt my way to
+the library door, and into the room.  Once there, I used the flash
+to discover that the windows were shuttered, and proceeded to take
+off my hat and coat, which I placed on a chair near the door.  It
+was at this time that I discovered that the battery of my lamp was
+very weak, and finding a candle in a tall brass stick on the
+mantelpiece, I lighted it.
+
+Then I looked about.  The house had evidently been hastily closed.
+Some of the furniture was covered with sheets, while part of it
+stood unprotected.  The rug had been folded into the center of the
+room, and covered with heavy brown papers, and I was extremely
+startled to hear the papers rustling.  A mouse, however, proved to
+be the source of the sound, and I pulled myself together with a jerk.
+
+It is to be remembered that I had left my hat and overcoat on a
+chair near the door.  There could be no mistake, as the chair was
+a light one, and the weight of my overcoat threw it back against
+the wall.
+
+Candle in hand, I stepped out into the hail, and was immediately
+met by a crash which reverberated through the house.  In my alarm
+my teeth closed on the end of my tongue, with agonizing results,
+but the sound died away, and I concluded that an upper window had
+been left open, and that the rising wind had slammed a door.  But
+my morale, as we say since the war, had been shaken, and I
+recklessly lighted a second candle and placed it on the table in
+the hall at the foot of the staircase, to facilitate my exit in
+case I desired to make a hurried one.
+
+Then I climbed slowly.  The fog had apparently made its way into
+the house, for when, halfway up, I turned and looked down, the
+candlelight was hardly more than a spark, surrounded by a
+luminous aura.
+
+I do not know exactly when I began to feel that I was not alone
+in the house.  It was, I think, when I was on a chair on top of a
+table in Arthur's room, with my candle upheld to the ceiling.  It
+seemed to me that something was moving stealthily in the room
+overhead.  I stood there, candle upheld, and every faculty I
+possessed seemed centered in my ears.  It was not a footstep.  It
+was a soft and dragging movement.  Had I not been near the ceiling
+I should not have heard it.  Indeed, a moment later I was not
+certain that I had heard it.
+
+My chair, on top of the table, was none too securely balanced.  I
+had found what I was looking for, a part of the plaster ornament
+broken away, and replaced by a whitish substance, not plaster.  I
+got out my penknife and cut away the foreign matter, showing a
+small hole beneath, a bullet-hole, if I knew anything about
+bullet-holes.
+
+Then I heard the dragging movement above, and what with alarm and
+my insecure position, I suddenly overbalanced, chair and all.  My
+head must have struck on the corner of the table, for I was dazed
+for a few moments.  The candle had gone out, of course.  I felt
+for the chair, righted it, and sat down.  I was dizzy and I was
+frightened.  I was afraid to move, lest the dragging thing above
+come down and creep over me in the darkness and smother me.
+
+And sitting there, I remembered the very things I most wished to
+forget--the black curtain behind Miss Jeremy, the things flung by
+unseen hands into the room, the way my watch had slid over the
+table and fallen to the floor.
+
+Since that time I know there is a madness of courage, born of
+terror.  Nothing could be more intolerable than to sit there and
+wait.  It is the same insanity that drove men out of the trenches
+to the charge and almost certain death, rather than to sit and
+wait for what might come.
+
+In a way, I daresay I charged the upper floor of the house.
+Recalling the situation from this safe lapse of time, I think
+that I was in a condition close to frenzy.  I know that it did not
+occur to me to leap down the staircase and escape, and I believe
+now this was due to a conviction that I was dealing with the
+supernatural, and that on no account did I dare to turn my back
+on it.  All children and some adults, I am sure, have known this
+feeling.
+
+Whatever drove me, I know that, candle in hand, and hardly sane,
+I ran up the staircase, and into the room overhead.  It was empty.
+
+As suddenly as my sanity had gone, it returned to me.  The sight
+of two small beds, side by side, a tiny dressing-table, a row of
+toys on the mantelpiece, was calming.  Here was the children's
+night nursery, a white and placid room which could house nothing
+hideous.
+
+I was humiliated and ashamed.  I, Horace Johnson, a man of dignity
+and reputation, even in a small way, a successful after-dinner
+speaker, numbering fifty-odd years of logical living to my credit,
+had been running half-maddened toward a mythical danger from which
+I had been afraid to run away!
+
+I sat down and mopped my face with my pocket handkerchief.
+
+After a time I got up, and going to a window looked down at the
+quiet world below.  The fog was lifting.  Automobiles were making
+cautious progress along the slippery street.  A woman with a
+basket had stopped under the street light and was rearranging her
+parcels.  The clock of the city hall, visible over the opposite
+roofs, marked only twenty minutes to nine.  It was still early
+evening--not even midnight, the magic hour of the night.
+
+Somehow that fact reassured me, and I was able to take stock of
+my surroundings.  I realized, for instance, that I stood in the
+room over Arthur's dressing room, and that it was into the
+ceiling under me that the second--or probably the first--bullet
+had penetrated.  I know, as it happens, very little of firearms,
+but I did realize that a shot from a .45 Colt automatic would have
+considerable penetrative power.  To be exact, that the bullet had
+probably either lodged itself in a joist, or had penetrated
+through the flooring and might be somewhere over my head.
+
+But my candle was inadequate for more than the most superficial
+examination of the ceiling, which presented so far as I could
+see an unbroken surface.  I turned my attention, therefore, to the
+floor.  It was when I was turning the rug back that I recognized
+the natural and not supernatural origin of the sound which had so
+startled me. It had been the soft movement of the carpet across
+the floor boards.
+
+Some one, then, had been there before me--some one who knew what
+I knew, had reasoned as I reasoned.  Some one who, in all
+probability, still lurked on the upper floor.
+
+Obeying an impulse, I stood erect and called out sharply, "Sperry!"
+I said.  "Sperry!"
+
+There was no answer.  I tried again, calling Herbert.  But only
+my own voice came back to me, and the whistling of the wind through
+the window I had opened.
+
+My fears, never long in abeyance that night, roused again.  I had
+instantly a conviction that some human figure, sinister and
+dangerous, was lurking in the shadows of that empty floor, and
+I remember backing away from the door and standing in the center
+of the room, prepared for some stealthy, murderous assault.  When
+none came I looked about for a weapon, and finally took the only
+thing in sight, a coal-tongs from the fireplace.  Armed with that,
+I made a cursory round of the near-by rooms but there was no one
+hiding in them.
+
+I went back to the rug and examined the floor beneath it.  I was
+right.  Some one had been there before me.  Bits of splintered wood
+lay about.  The second bullet had been fired, had buried itself in
+the flooring, and had, some five minutes before, been dug out.
+
+
+
+VII
+
+
+The extraordinary thing about the Arthur Wells story was not his
+killing.  For killing it was.  It was the way it was solved.
+
+Here was a young woman, Miss Jeremy, who had not known young Wells,
+had not known his wife, had, until that first meeting at Mrs. Dane's,
+never met any member of the Neighborhood Club.  Yet, but for her,
+Arthur Wells would have gone to his grave bearing the stigma of
+moral cowardice, of suicide.
+
+The solution, when it came, was amazing, but remarkably simple.
+Like most mysteries.  I have in my own house, for instance, an
+example of a great mystery, founded on mere absentmindedness.
+
+This is what my wife terms the mystery of the fire-tongs.
+
+I had left the Wells house as soon as I had made the discovery in
+the night nursery.  I carried the candle and the fire-tongs
+downstairs.  I was, apparently, calm but watchful.  I would have
+said that I had never been more calm in my life.  I knew quite well
+that I had the fire-tongs in my hand.  Just when I ceased to be
+cognizant of them was probably when, on entering the library, I
+found that my overcoat had disappeared, and that my stiff hat,
+badly broken, lay on the floor.  However, as I say, I was still
+extraordinarily composed.  I picked up my hat, and moving to the
+rear door, went out and closed it.  When I reached the street,
+however, I had only gone a few yards when I discovered that I
+was still carrying the lighted candle, and that a man, passing by,
+had stopped and was staring after me.
+
+My composure is shown by the fact that I dropped the candle down
+the next sewer opening, but the fact remains that I carried the
+fire-tongs home.  I do not recall doing so.  In fact, I knew
+nothing of the matter until morning.  On the way to my house I was
+elaborating a story to the effect that my overcoat had been stolen
+from a restaurant where I and my client had dined.  The hat offered
+more serious difficulties.  I fancied that, by kissing my wife
+good-by at the breakfast table, I might be able to get out without
+her following me to the front door, which is her custom.
+
+But, as a matter of fact, I need not have concerned myself about
+the hat.  When I descended to breakfast the next morning I found
+her surveying the umbrella-stand in the hall.  The fire-tongs were
+standing there, gleaming, among my sticks and umbrellas.
+
+I lied.  I lied shamelessly.  She is a nervous woman, and, as we
+have no children, her attitude toward me is one of watchful waiting.
+Through long years she has expected me to commit some indiscretion
+--innocent, of course, such as going out without my overcoat on a
+cool day--and she intends to be on hand for every emergency.  I
+dared not confess, therefore, that on the previous evening I had
+burglariously entered a closed house, had there surprised another
+intruder at work, had fallen and bumped my head severely, and had,
+finally, had my overcoat taken.
+
+"Horace," she said coldly, "where did you get those fire-tongs?"
+
+"Fire-tongs?" I repeated.  "Why, that's so.  They are fire-tongs."
+
+"Where did you get them?"
+
+"My dear," I expostulated, "I get them?"
+
+"What I would like to ask," she said, with an icy calmness that I
+have learned to dread, "is whether you carried them home over your
+head, under the impression that you had your umbrella."
+
+"Certainly not," I said with dignity.  "I assure you, my dear--"
+
+"I am not a curious woman," she put in incisively, "but when my
+husband spends an evening out, and returns minus his overcoat, with
+his hat mashed, a lump the size of an egg over his ear, and puts a
+pair of fire-tongs in the umbrella stand under the impression that
+it is an umbrella, I have a right to ask at least if he intends to
+continue his life of debauchery."
+
+I made a mistake then.  I should have told her.  Instead, I took my
+broken hat and jammed it on my head with a force that made the lump
+she had noticed jump like a toothache, and went out.
+
+When, at noon and luncheon, I tried to tell her the truth, she
+listened to the end: Then: "I should think you could have done better
+than that," she said.  "You have had all morning to think it out."
+
+However, if things were in a state of armed neutrality at home, I
+had a certain compensation for them when I told my story to Sperry
+that afternoon.
+
+"You see how it is," I finished.  "You can stay out of this, or come
+in, Sperry, but I cannot stop now.  He was murdered beyond a doubt,
+and there is an intelligent effort being made to eliminate every
+particle of evidence."
+
+He nodded.
+
+"It looks like it.  And this man who was there last night--"
+
+"Why a man?"
+
+"He took your overcoat, instead of his own, didn't he?  It may have
+been--it's curious, isn't it, that we've had no suggestion of
+Ellingham in all the rest of the material."
+
+Like the other members of the Neighborhood Club, he had a copy of
+the proceedings at the two seances, and now he brought them out
+and fell to studying them.
+
+"She was right about the bullet in the ceiling," he reflected.  "I
+suppose you didn't look for the box of shells for the revolver?"
+
+"I meant to, but it slipped my mind."
+
+He shuffled the loose pages of the record.  "Cane--washed away by
+the water--a knee that is hurt--the curtain would have been safer
+--Hawkins--the drawing-room furniture is all over the house.  That
+last, Horace, isn't pertinent.  It refers clearly to the room we
+were in.  Of course, the point is, how much of the rest is also
+extraneous matter?"  He re-read one of the sheets.  "Of course that
+belongs, about Hawkins.  And probably this: 'It will be terrible if
+the letters are found.' They were in the pocketbook, presumably."
+
+He folded up the papers and replaced them in a drawer.
+
+"We'd better go back to the house," he said.  "Whoever took your
+overcoat by mistake probably left one.  The difficulty is, of course,
+that he probably discovered his error and went back again last night.
+Confound it, man, if you had thought of that at the time, we would
+have something to go on today."
+
+"If I had thought of a number of things I'd have stayed out of the
+place altogether," I retorted tartly.  "I wish you could help me
+about the fire-tongs, Sperry.  I don't seem able to think of any
+explanation that Mrs. Johnson would be willing to accept."
+
+"Tell her the truth."
+
+"I don't think you understand," I explained.  "She simply wouldn't
+believe it.  And if she did I should have to agree to drop the
+investigation.  As a matter of fact, Sperry, I had resorted to
+subterfuge in order to remain out last evening, and I am bitterly
+regretting my mendacity."
+
+But Sperry has, I am afraid, rather loose ideas.
+
+"Every man," he said, "would rather tell the truth, but every woman
+makes it necessary to lie to her.  Forget the fire-tongs, Horace,
+and forget Mrs. Johnson to-night.  He may not have dared to go back
+in day-light for his overcoat."
+
+"Very well," I agreed.
+
+But it was not very well, and I knew it.  I felt that, in a way, my
+whole domestic happiness was at stake.  My wife is a difficult
+person to argue with, and as tenacious of an opinion once formed
+as are all very amiable people.  However, unfortunately for our
+investigation, but luckily for me, under the circumstances, Sperry
+was called to another city that afternoon and did not return for
+two days.
+
+It was, it will be recalled, on the Thursday night following the
+second sitting that I had gone alone to the Wells house, and my
+interview with Sperry was on Friday.  It was on Friday afternoon
+that I received a telephone message from Mrs. Dane.
+
+It was actually from her secretary, the Clara who had recorded the
+seances.  It was Mrs. Dane's misfortune to be almost entirely
+dependent on the various young women who, one after the other, were
+employed to look after her.  I say "one after the other" advisedly.
+It had long been a matter of good-natured jesting in the Neighborhood
+Club that Mrs. Dane conducted a matrimonial bureau, as one young
+woman after another was married from her house.  It was her kindly
+habit, on such occasions, to give the bride a wedding, and only a
+month before it had been my privilege to give away in holy wedlock
+Miss Clara's predecessor.
+
+"Mrs. Dane would like you to stop in and have a cup of tea with her
+this afternoon, Mr. Johnson," said the secretary.
+
+"At what time?"
+
+"At four o'clock."
+
+I hesitated.  I felt that my wife was waiting at home for further
+explanation of the coal-tongs, and that the sooner we had it out
+the better.  But, on the other hand, Mrs. Dane's invitations, by
+reason of her infirmity, took on something of the nature of commands.
+
+"Please say that I will be there at four," I replied.
+
+I bought a new hat that afternoon, and told the clerk to destroy
+the old one.  Then I went to Mrs. Dane's.
+
+She was in the drawing-room, now restored to its usual clutter of
+furniture and ornaments.  I made my way around two tables, stepped
+over a hassock and under the leaves of an artificial palm, and
+shook her hand.
+
+She was plainly excited.  Never have I known a woman who, confined
+to a wheel-chair, lived so hard.  She did not allow life to pass
+her windows, if I may put it that way.  She called it in, and set
+it moving about her chair, herself the nucleus around which were
+enacted all sorts of small neighborhood dramas and romances.  Her
+secretaries did not marry.  She married them.
+
+It is curious to look back and remember how Herbert and Sperry and
+myself had ignored this quality in her, in the Wells case.  She was
+not to be ignored, as I discovered that afternoon.
+
+"Sit down," she said.  "You look half sick, Horace."
+
+Nothing escapes her eyes, so I was careful to place myself with the
+lump on my head turned away from her.  But I fancy she saw it, for
+her eyes twinkled.
+
+"Horace!  Horace!" she said.  "How I have detested you all week!"
+
+"I?  You detested me?"
+
+"Loathed you," she said with unction.  "You are cruel and ungrateful.
+Herbert has influenza, and does not count.  And Sperry is in love
+--oh yes, I know it.  I know a great many things.  But you!"
+
+I could only stare at her.
+
+"The strange thing is," she went on, "that I have known you for
+years, and never suspected your sense of humor.  You'll forgive me,
+I know, if I tell you that your lack of humor was to my mind the
+only flaw in an otherwise perfect character."
+
+"I am not aware--" I began stiffly.  "I have always believed that
+I furnished to the Neighborhood Club its only leaven of humor."
+
+"Don't spoil it," she begged.  "Don't.  If you could know how I
+have enjoyed it.  All afternoon I have been chuckling.  The
+fire-tongs, Horace.  The fire-tongs!"
+
+Then I knew that my wife had been to Mrs. Dane and I drew a long
+breath.  "I assure you," I said gravely, "that while doubtless I
+carried the wretched things home and--er--placed them where they
+were found, I have not the slightest recollection of it.  And it
+is hardly amusing, is it?"
+
+"Amusing!" she cried.  "It's delicious.  It has made me a young
+woman again.  Horace, if I could have seen your wife's face when
+she found them, I would give cheerfully almost anything I possess."
+
+But underneath her mirth I knew there was something else.  And,
+after all, she could convince my wife if she were convinced herself.
+I told the whole story--of the visit Sperry and I had made the
+night Arthur Wells was shot, and of what we discovered; of the
+clerk at the pharmacy and his statement, and even of the whiskey
+and its unfortunate effect--at which, I regret to say, she was
+vastly amused; and, last of all, of my experience the previous
+night in the deserted house.
+
+She was very serious when I finished.  Tea came, but we forgot
+to drink it.  Her eyes flashed with excitement, her faded face
+flushed.  And, with it all, as I look back, there was an air of
+suppressed excitement that seemed to have nothing to do with my
+narrative.  I remembered it, however, when the denouement came
+the following week.
+
+She was a remarkable woman.  Even then she knew, or strongly
+suspected, the thing that the rest of us had missed, the x of the
+equation.  But I think it only fair to record that she was in
+possession of facts which we did not have, and which she did not
+divulge until the end.
+
+"You have been so ungenerous with me," she said finally, "that I
+am tempted not to tell you why I sent for you.  Of course, I know I
+am only a helpless old woman, and you men are people of affairs.
+But now and then I have a flash of intelligence.  I'm going to tell
+you, but you don't deserve it."
+
+She went down into the black silk bag at her side which was as much
+a part of her attire as the false front she wore with such careless
+abandon, and which, brown in color and indifferently waved, was
+invariably parting from its mooring.  She drew out a newspaper
+clipping.
+
+"On going over Clara's notes," she said, "I came to the conclusion,
+last Tuesday, that the matter of the missing handbag and the letters
+was important.  More important, probably, than the mere record shows.
+Do you recall the note of distress in Miss Jeremy's voice?  It was
+almost a wail."
+
+I had noticed it.
+
+"I have plenty of time to think," she added, not without pathos.
+"There is only one Monday night in the week, and--the days are
+long.  It occurred to me to try to trace that bag."
+
+"In what way?"
+
+"How does any one trace lost articles?" she demanded.  "By
+advertising, of course.  Last Wednesday I advertised for the bag."
+
+I was too astonished to speak.
+
+"I reasoned like this: If there was no such bag, there was no harm
+done.  As a matter of fact, if there was no such bag, the chances
+were that we were all wrong, anyhow.  If there was such a bag, I
+wanted it.  Here is the advertisement as I inserted it."
+
+She gave me a small newspaper cutting
+
+"Lost, a handbag containing private letters, car-tickets, etc.
+Liberal reward paid for its return.  Please write to A 31, the
+Daily News."
+
+I sat with it on my palm.  It was so simple, so direct.  And I,
+a lawyer, and presumably reasonably acute, had not thought of it!
+
+"You are wasted on us, Mrs. Dane," I acknowledged.  "Well?  I
+see something has come of it."
+
+"Yes, but I'm not ready for it."
+
+She dived again into the bag, and brought up another clipping.
+
+"On the day that I had that inserted," she said impressively, "this
+also appeared.  They were in the same column."  She read the second
+clipping aloud, slowly, that I might gain all its significance:
+
+"Lost on the night of Monday, November the second, between State
+Avenue and Park Avenue, possibly on an Eastern Line street car,
+a black handbag containing keys, car-tickets, private letters,
+and a small sum of money.  Reward and no questions asked if
+returned to Daily News office."
+
+She passed the clipping to me and I compared the two.  It looked
+strange, and I confess to a tingling feeling that coincidence,
+that element so much to be feared in any investigation, was not
+the solution here.  But there was such a chance, and I spoke of it.
+
+"Coincidence rubbish!" she retorted.  "I am not through, my friend."
+
+She went down into the bag again, and I expected nothing less than
+the pocketbook, letters and all, to appear.  But she dragged up,
+among a miscellany of handkerchiefs, a bottle of smelling-salts,
+and a few almonds, of which she was inordinately fond, an envelope.
+
+"Yesterday," she said, "I took a taxicab ride.  You know my chair
+gets tiresome, occasionally.  I stopped at the newspaper office,
+and found the bag had not been turned in, but that there was a
+letter for A 31."  She held out the envelope to me.
+
+"Read it," she observed.  "It is a curious human document.  You'll
+probably be no wiser for reading it, but it shows one thing: We are
+on the track of something."
+
+I have the letter before me now.  It is written on glazed paper,
+ruled with blue lines.  The writing is of the flowing style we
+used to call Spencerian, and if it lacks character I am inclined
+to believe that its weakness is merely the result of infrequent
+use of a pen.
+
+You know who this is from.  I have the bag and the letters.  In
+a safe place.  If you would treat me like a human being, you could
+have them.  I know where the walking-stick is, also.  I will tell
+you this.  I have no wish to do her any harm.  She will have to
+pay up in the next world, even if she gets off in this.  The way
+I reason is this:  As long as I have the things, I've got the
+whiphand.  I've got you, too, although you may think I haven't.
+
+About the other matter I was innocent.  I swear it again.  I
+never did it.  You are the only one in all the world.  I would
+rather be dead than go on like this.
+
+It is unsigned.
+
+I stared from the letter to Mrs. Dane.  She was watching me, her
+face grave and rather sad.
+
+"You and I, Horace," she said, "live our orderly lives.  We eat,
+and sleep, and talk, and even labor.  We think we are living.  But
+for the last day or two I have been seeing visions--you and I and
+the rest of us, living on the surface, and underneath, carefully
+kept down so it will not make us uncomfortable, a world of passion
+and crime and violence and suffering.  That letter is a tragedy."
+
+But if she had any suspicion then as to the writer, and I think she
+had not, she said nothing, and soon after I started for home.  I
+knew that one of two things would have happened there: either my
+wife would have put away the fire-tongs, which would indicate a
+truce, or they would remain as they had been, which would indicate
+that she still waited for the explanation I could not give.  It
+was with a certain tension, therefore, that I opened my front door.
+
+The fire-tongs still stood in the stand.
+
+In one way, however, Mrs. Johnson's refusal to speak to me that
+evening had a certain value, for it enabled me to leave the
+house without explanation, and thus to discover that, if an
+overcoat had been left in place of my own, it had been taken away.
+It also gave me an opportunity to return the fire-tongs, a
+proceeding which I had considered would assist in a return of the
+entente cordiale at home, but which most unjustly appeared to have
+exactly the opposite effect.  It has been my experience that the
+most innocent action may, under certain circumstances, assume an
+appearance of extreme guilt.
+
+By Saturday the condition of affairs between my wife and myself
+remained in statu quo, and I had decided on a bold step.  This
+was to call a special meeting of the Neighborhood Club, without
+Miss Jeremy, and put before them the situation as it stood at
+that time, with a view to formulating a future course of action,
+and also of publicly vindicating myself before my wife.
+
+In deference to Herbert Robinson's recent attack of influenza,
+we met at the Robinson house.  Sperry himself wheeled Mrs. Dane
+over, and made a speech.
+
+"We have called this meeting," he said, "because a rather singular
+situation has developed.  What was commenced purely as an
+interesting experiment has gone beyond that stage.  We find
+ourselves in the curious position of taking what comes very close
+to being a part in a domestic tragedy.  The affair is made more
+delicate by the fact that this tragedy involves people who, if not
+our friends, at least are very well known to us.  The purpose of
+this meeting, to be brief, is to determine whether the Neighborhood
+Club, as a body, wishes to go on with the investigation, or to stop
+where we are."
+
+He paused, but, as no one spoke, he went on again.  "It is really
+not as simple as that," he said.  "To stop now, in view of the
+evidence we intend to place before the Club, is to leave in all
+our minds certain suspicions that may be entirely unjust.  On the
+other hand, to go on is very possible to place us all in a position
+where to keep silent is to be an accessory after a crime."
+
+He then proceeded, in orderly fashion, to review the first sitting
+and its results.  He read from notes, elaborating them as he went
+along, for the benefit of the women, who had not been fully informed.
+As all the data of the Club is now in my possession, I copy these
+notes.
+
+"I shall review briefly the first sitting, and what followed it."
+He read the notes of the sitting first.  "You will notice that I
+have made no comment on the physical phenomena which occurred early
+in the seance.  This is for two reasons: first, it has no bearing
+on the question at issue.  Second, it has no quality of novelty.
+Certain people, under certain conditions, are able to exert powers
+that we can not explain.  I have no belief whatever in their
+spiritistic quality.  They are purely physical, the exercise of
+powers we have either not yet risen high enough in our scale of
+development to recognize generally, or which have survived from
+some early period when our natural gifts had not been smothered
+by civilization."
+
+And, to make our position clear, that is today the attitude of the
+Neighborhood Club.  The supernormal, as I said at the beginning,
+not the supernatural, is our explanation.
+
+Sperry's notes were alphabetical.
+
+(a) At 9:15, or somewhat earlier, on Monday night a week ago Arthur
+Wells killed himself, or was killed.  At 9:30 on that same evening
+by Mr. Johnson's watch, consulted at the time, Miss Jeremy had
+described such a crime.  (Here he elaborated, repeating the medium's
+account.)
+
+(b) At midnight, Sperry, reaching home, had found a message
+summoning him to the Wells house.  The message had been left at
+9:35.  He had telephoned me, and we had gone together, arriving at
+approximately 12:30.
+
+(c) We had been unable to enter, and, recalling the medium's
+description of a key on a nail among the vines, had searched for
+and found such a key, and had admitted ourselves.  Mrs. Wells, a
+governess, a doctor, and two policemen were in the house.  The
+dead man lay in the room in which he had died.  (Here he went at
+length into the condition of the room, the revolver with one
+chamber empty, and the blood-stained sponge and razorstrop behind
+the bathtub.  We had made a hasty examination of the ceiling, but
+had found no trace of a second shot.)
+
+(d) The governess had come in at just after the death.  Mr. Horace
+Johnson had had a talk with her.  She had left the front door
+unfastened when she went out at eight o'clock.  She said she had
+gone out to telephone about another position, as she was
+dissatisfied.  She had phoned from, Elliott's pharmacy on State
+Avenue.  Later that night Mr. Johnson had gone to Elliott's.  She
+had lied about the message.  She had really telephoned to a number
+which the pharmacy clerk had already discovered was that of the
+Ellingham house.  The message was that Mr. Ellingham was not to
+come, as Mr. and Mrs. Wells were going out.  It was not the first
+time she had telephoned to that number.
+
+There was a stir in the room.  Something which we had tacitly
+avoided had come suddenly into the open.  Sperry raised his hand.
+
+"It is necessary to be explicit," he said, "that the Club may see
+where it stands.  It is, of course, not necessary to remind
+ourselves that this evening's disclosures are of the most secret
+nature.  I urge that the Club jump to no hasty conclusions, and
+that there shall be no interruptions until we have finished with
+our records."
+
+(e) At a private seance, which Mr. Johnson and I decided was
+excusable under the circumstances, the medium was unable to give
+us anything.  This in spite of the fact that we had taken with
+us a walking-stick belonging to the dead man.
+
+(f) The second sitting of the Club.  I need only refresh your minds
+as to one or two things; the medium spoke of a lost pocketbook, and
+of letters.  While the point is at least capable of doubt,
+apparently the letters were in the pocketbook.  Also, she said that
+a curtain would have been better, that Hawkins was a nuisance, and
+that everything was all right unless the bullet had made a hole in
+the floor above.  You will also recall the mention of a box of
+cartridges in a table drawer in Arthur Wells's room.
+
+"I will now ask Mr. Horace Johnson to tell what occurred on the
+night before last, Thursday evening."
+
+"I do not think Horace has a very clear recollection of last
+Thursday night," my wife said, coldly.  "And I wish to go on record
+at once that if he claims that spirits broke his hat, stole his
+overcoat, bumped his head and sent him home with a pair of
+fire-tongs for a walking-stick, I don't believe him."
+
+Which attitude Herbert, I regret to say, did not help when he said:
+
+"Don't worry, Horace will soon be too old for the gay life.
+Remember your arteries, Horace."
+
+I have quoted this interruption to show how little, outside of
+Sperry, Mrs. Dane and myself, the Neighborhood Club appreciated
+the seriousness of the situation.  Herbert, for instance, had been
+greatly amused when Sperry spoke of my finding the razorstrop and
+had almost chuckled over our investigation of the ceiling.
+
+But they were very serious when I had finished my statement.
+
+"Great Scott!" Herbert said.  "Then she was right, after all!  I
+say, I guess I've been no end of an ass."
+
+I was inclined to agree with him.  But the real effect of my brief
+speech was on my wife.
+
+It was a real compensation for that night of terror and for the
+uncomfortable time since to find her gaze no longer cold, but
+sympathetic, and--if I may be allowed to say so--admiring.  When
+at last I sat down beside her, she put her hand on my arm in a way
+that I had missed since the unfortunate affair of the pharmacy
+whiskey.
+
+Mrs. Dane then read and explained the two clippings and the letter,
+and the situation, so far as it had developed, was before the Club.
+
+Were we to go on, or to stop?
+
+Put to a vote, the women were for going on.  The men were more
+doubtful, and Herbert voiced what I think we all felt.
+
+"We're getting in pretty deep," he said.  "We have no right to step
+in where the law has stepped out--no legal right, that is.  As to
+moral right, it depends on what we are holding these sittings for.
+If we are making what we started out to make, an investigation into
+psychic matters, then we can go on.  But with this proviso, I think:
+Whatever may come of it, the result is of psychic interest only.  We
+are not trailing a criminal."
+
+"Crime is the affair of every decent-minded citizen," his sister
+put in concisely.
+
+But the general view was that Herbert was right.  I am not
+defending our course.  I am recording it.  It is, I admit, open to
+argument.
+
+Having decided on what to do, or not to do, we broke into animated
+discussion.  The letter to A 31 was the rock on which all our
+theories foundered, that and the message the governess had sent to
+Charlie Ellingham not to come to the Wells house that night.  By
+no stretch of rather excited imaginations could we imagine Ellingham
+writing such a letter.  Who had written the letter, then, and for
+whom was it meant?
+
+As to the telephone message, it seemed to preclude the possibility
+of Ellingham's having gone to the house that night.  But the fact
+remained that a man, as yet unidentified, was undoubtedly concerned
+in the case, had written the letter, and had probably been in the
+Wells house the night I went there alone.
+
+In the end, we decided to hold one more seance, and then, unless
+the further developments were such that we must go on, to let the
+affair drop.
+
+It is typical of the strained nervous tension which had developed
+in all of us during the past twelve days, that that night when,
+having forgotten to let the dog in, my wife and I were roused from
+a sound sleep by his howling, she would not allow me to go down and
+admit him.
+
+
+
+VIII
+
+
+On Sunday I went to church.  I felt, after the strange phenomena
+in Mrs. Dane's drawing-room, and after the contact with tragedy to
+which they had led, that I must hold with a sort of desperation to
+the traditions and beliefs by which I had hitherto regulated my
+conduct.  And the church did me good.  Between the immortality
+it taught and the theory of spiritualism as we had seen it in action
+there was a great gulf, and I concluded that this gulf was the soul.
+The conclusion that mind and certain properties of mind survived was
+not enough.  The thought of a disembodied intelligence was pathetic,
+depressing.  But the thought of a glorified soul was the hope of the
+world.
+
+My wife, too, was in a penitent and rather exalted mood.  During the
+sermon she sat with her hand in mine, and I was conscious of peace
+and a deep thankfulness.  We had been married for many years, and
+we had grown very close.  Of what importance was the Wells case, or
+what mattered it that there were strange new-old laws in the
+universe, so long as we kept together?
+
+That my wife had felt a certain bitterness toward Miss Jeremy, a
+jealousy of her powers, even of her youth, had not dawned on me.
+But when, in her new humility, she suggested that we call on the
+medium that afternoon.  I realized that, in her own way, she was
+making a sort of atonement.
+
+Miss Jeremy lived with an elderly spinster cousin, a short distance
+out of town.  It was a grim house, coldly and rigidly Calvinistic.
+It gave an unpleasant impression at the start, and our comfort was
+not increased by the discovery, made early in the call, that the
+cousin regarded the Neighborhood Club and its members with suspicion.
+
+The cousin--her name was Connell--was small and sharp, and she
+entered the room followed by a train of cats.  All the time she was
+frigidly greeting us, cats were coming in at the door, one after
+the other.  It fascinated me.  I do not like cats.  I am, as a matter
+of confession, afraid of cats.  They affect me as do snakes.  They
+trailed in in a seemingly endless procession, and one of them took
+a fancy to me, and leaped from behind on to my shoulder.  The shock
+set me stammering.
+
+"My cousin is out," said Miss Connell.  "Doctor Sperry has taken her
+for a ride.  She will be back very soon."
+
+I shook a cat from my trouser leg, and my wife made an unimportant
+remark.
+
+"I may as well tell you, I disapprove of what Alice is doing," said
+Miss Connell.  "She doesn't have to.  I've offered her a good home.
+She was brought up a Presbyterian.  I call this sort of thing
+playing with the powers of darkness.  Only the eternally damned are
+doomed to walk the earth.  The blessed are at rest."
+
+"But you believe in her powers, don't you?" my wife asked.
+
+"I believe she can do extraordinary things.  She saw my father's
+spirit in this very room last night, and described him, although
+she had never seen him."
+
+As she had said that only the eternally damned were doomed to walk
+the earth, I was tempted to comment on this stricture on her
+departed parent, but a large cat, much scarred with fighting and
+named Violet, insisted at that moment on crawling into my lap, and
+my attention was distracted.
+
+"But the whole thing is un-Christian and undignified," Miss Connell
+proceeded, in her cold voice.  "Come, Violet, don't annoy the
+gentleman.  I have other visions of the next life than of rapping
+on tables and chairs, and throwing small articles about."
+
+It was an extraordinary visit.  Even the arrival of Miss Jeremy
+herself, flushed with the air and looking singularly normal, was
+hardly a relief.  Sperry, who followed, was clearly pleased to
+see us, however.
+
+It was not hard to see how things were with him.  He helped the
+girl out of her wraps with a manner that was almost proprietary,
+and drew a chair for her close to the small fire which hardly
+affected the chill of the room.
+
+With their entrance a spark of hospitality seemed to kindle in the
+cat lady's breast.  It was evident that she liked Sperry.  Perhaps
+she saw in him a method of weaning her cousin from traffic with
+the powers of darkness.  She said something about tea, and went out.
+
+Sperry looked across at the girl and smiled.
+
+"Shall I tell them?" he said.
+
+"I want very much to have them know."
+
+He stood up, and with that unconscious drama which actuates a man
+at a crisis in his affairs, he put a hand on her shoulder.  "This
+young lady is going to marry me," he said.  "We are very happy
+today."
+
+But I thought he eyed us anxiously.  We were very close friends,
+and he wanted our approval.  I am not sure if we were wise.  I do
+not yet know.  But something of the new understanding between my
+wife and myself must have found its way to our voices, for he was
+evidently satisfied.
+
+"Then that's all right," he said heartily.  And my wife, to my
+surprise, kissed the girl.
+
+Except for the cats, sitting around, the whole thing was strangely
+normal.  And yet, even there, something happened that set me to
+thinking afterward.  Not that it was strange in itself, but that
+it seemed never possible to get very far away from the Wells mystery.
+
+Tea was brought in by Hawkins!
+
+I knew him immediately, but he did not at once see me.  He was
+evidently accustomed to seeing Sperry there, and he did not
+recognize my wife.  But when he had put down the tray and turned
+to pick up Sperry's overcoat to carry it into the hall, he saw me.
+The man actually started.  I cannot say that he changed color.  He
+was always a pale, anemic-looking individual.  But it was a
+perceptible instant before he stooped and gathered up the coat.
+
+Sperry turned to me when he had gone out.  "That was Hawkins,
+Horace," he said.  "You remember, don't you?  The Wellses' butler."
+
+"I knew him at once."
+
+"He wrote to me asking for a position, and I got him this.  Looks
+sick, poor devil.  I intend to have a go at his chest."
+
+"How long has he been here?"
+
+"More than a week, I think."
+
+As I drank my tea, I pondered.  After all, the Neighborhood Club
+must guard against the possibility of fraud, and I felt that Sperry
+had been indiscreet, to say the least.  From the time of Hawkins'
+service in Miss Jeremy's home there would always be the suspicion
+of collusion between them.  I did not believe it was so, but Herbert,
+for instance, would be inclined to suspect her.  Suppose that
+Hawkins knew about the crime?  Or knew something and surmised the
+rest?
+
+When we rose to go Sperry drew me aside.
+
+"You think I've made a mistake?"
+
+"I do."
+
+He flung away with an impatient gesture, then came back to me.
+
+"Now look here," he said, "I know what you mean, and the whole idea
+is absurd.  Of course I never thought about it, but even allowing
+for connivance--which I don't for a moment--the fellow was not
+in the house at the time of the murder."
+
+"I know he says he was not."
+
+"Even then," he said, "how about the first sitting?  I'll swear she
+had never even heard of him then."
+
+"The fact remains that his presence here makes us all absurd."
+
+"Do you want me to throw him out?"
+
+"I don't see what possible good that will do now."
+
+I was uneasy all the way home.  The element of doubt, always so
+imminent in our dealings with psychic phenomena, had me by the
+throat.  How much did Hawkins know?  Was there any way, without
+going to the police, to find if he had really been out of the Wellses'
+house that night, now almost two weeks ago, when Arthur Wells had
+been killed?
+
+That evening I went to Sperry's house, after telephoning that I
+was coming.  On the way I stopped in at Mrs. Dane's and secured
+something from her.  She was wildly curious, and made me promise
+to go in on my way back, and explain.  I made a compromise.
+
+"I will come in if I have anything to tell you," I said.
+
+But I knew, by her grim smile, that she would station herself by
+her window, and that I would stop, unless I made a detour of three
+blocks to avoid her.  She is a very determined woman.
+
+Sperry was waiting for me in his library, a pleasant room which I
+have often envied him.  Even the most happily married man wishes,
+now and then, for some quiet, dull room which is essentially his
+own.  My own library is really the family sitting-room, and a
+Christmas or so ago my wife presented me with a very handsome
+phonograph instrument.  My reading, therefore, is done to music,
+and the necessity for putting my book down to change the record at
+times interferes somewhat with my train of thought.
+
+So I entered Sperry's library with appreciation.  He was standing
+by the fire, with the grave face and slightly bent head of his
+professional manner.  We say, in the neighborhood, that Sperry
+uses his professional manner as armor, so I was rather prepared
+to do battle; but he forestalled me.
+
+"Horace," he said, "I have been a fool, a driveling idiot.  We
+were getting something at those sittings.  Something real.  She's
+wonderful.  She's going to give it up, but the fact remains that
+she has some power we haven't, and now I've discredited her!  I
+see it plainly enough."  He was rather bitter about it, but not
+hostile.  His fury was at himself.  "Of course," he went on,
+"I am sure that she got nothing from Hawkins.  But the fact remains
+--"  He was hurt in his pride of her.
+
+"I wonder," I said, "if you kept the letter Hawkins wrote you when
+he asked for a position."
+
+He was not sure.  He went into his consulting room and was gone
+for some time.  I took the opportunity to glance over his books
+and over the room.
+
+Arthur Wells's stick was standing in a corner, and I took it up
+and examined it.  It was an English malacca, light and strong, and
+had seen service.  It was long, too long for me; it occurred to me
+that Wells had been about my height, and that it was odd that he
+should have carried so long a stick.  There was no ease in swinging
+it.
+
+From that to the memory of Hawkins's face when Sperry took it, the
+night of the murder, in the hall of the Wells house, was only a
+step.  I seemed that day to be thinking considerably about Hawkins.
+
+When Sperry returned I laid the stick on the table.  There can be
+no doubt that I did so, for I had to move a book-rack to place it.
+One end, the handle, was near the ink-well, and the ferrule lay on
+a copy of Gibson's "Life Beyond the Grave," which Sperry had
+evidently been reading.
+
+Sperry had found the letter.  As I glanced at it I recognized the
+writing at once, thin and rather sexless, Spencerian.
+
+Dear Sir: Since Mr. Wells's death I am out of employment.
+Before I took the position of butler with Mr. Wells I was valet
+to Mr. Ellingham, and before that, in England, to Lord Condray.
+I have a very good letter of recommendation from Lord Condray.
+If you need a servant at this time I would do my best to give
+satisfaction.
+
+(Signed) ARTHUR HAWKINS.
+
+
+I put down the application, and took the anonymous letter about
+the bag from my pocketbook.  "Read this, Sperry," I said.  "You
+know the letter.  Mrs. Dane read it to us Saturday night.  But
+compare the writing."
+
+He compared the two, with a slight lifting of his eyebrows.  Then
+he put them down.  "Hawkins!" he said.  "Hawkins has the letters!
+And the bag!"
+
+"Exactly," I commented dryly.  "In other words, Hawkins was in Miss
+Jeremy's house when, at the second sitting, she told of the letters."
+
+I felt rather sorry for Sperry.  He paced the room wretchedly, the
+two letters in his hand.
+
+"But why should he tell her, if he did?" he demanded.  "The writer
+of that anonymous letter was writing for only one person.  Every
+effort is made to conceal his identity."
+
+I felt that he was right.  The point was well taken.
+
+"The question now is, to whom was it written?"  We pondered that,
+to no effect.  That Hawkins had certain letters which touched on
+the Wells affair, that they were probably in his possession in the
+Connell house, was clear enough.  But we had no possible authority
+for trying to get the letters, although Sperry was anxious to make
+the attempt.
+
+"Although I feel," he said, "that it is too late to help her very
+much.  She is innocent; I know that.  I think you know that, too,
+deep in that legal mind of yours.  It is wrong to discredit her
+because I did a foolish thing."  He warmed to his argument.  "Why,
+think, man," he said.  "The whole first sitting was practically
+coincident with the crime itself."
+
+It was true enough.  Whatever suspicion might be cast on the
+second seance, the first at least remained inexplicable, by any
+laws we recognized.  In a way, I felt sorry for Sperry.  Here
+he was, on the first day of his engagement, protesting her honesty,
+her complete ignorance of the revelations she had made and his
+intention to keep her in ignorance, and yet betraying his own
+anxiety and possible doubt in the same breath.
+
+"She did not even know there was a family named Wells.  When I
+said that Hawkins had been employed by the Wells, it meant nothing
+to her.  I was watching."
+
+So even Sperry was watching.  He was in love with her, but his
+scientific mind, like my legal one, was slow to accept what
+during the past two weeks it had been asked to accept.
+
+I left him at ten o'clock.  Mrs. Dane was still at her window, and
+her far-sighted old eyes caught me as I tried to steal past.  She
+rapped on the window, and I was obliged to go in.  Obliged, too, to
+tell her of the discovery and, at last, of Hawkins being in the
+Connell house.
+
+"I want those letters, Horace," she said at last.
+
+"So do I.  I'm not going to steal them."
+
+"The question is, where has he got them?"
+
+"The question is, dear lady, that they are not ours to take."
+
+"They are not his, either."
+
+Well, that was true enough.  But I had done all the private
+investigating I cared to.  And I told her so.  She only smiled
+cryptically.
+
+So far as I know, Mrs. Dane was the only one among us who had
+entirely escaped certain strange phenomena during that period, and
+as I have only so far recorded my own experiences, I shall here
+place in order the various manifestations made to the other members
+of the Neighborhood Club during that trying period and in their own
+words.  As none of them have suffered since, a certain allowance
+must be made for our nervous strain.  As before, I shall offer no
+explanation.
+
+Alice Robinson: On night following second seance saw a light in
+room, not referable to any outside influence.  Was an amorphous
+body which glowed pallidly and moved about wall over fireplace,
+gradually coming to stop in a corner, where it faded and disappeared.
+
+Clara, Mrs. Dane's secretary: Had not slept much since first
+seance.  Was frequently conscious that she was not alone in room,
+but on turning on light room was always empty.  Wakened twice
+with sense of extreme cold.  (I have recorded my own similar
+experience.)
+
+Sperry has consistently maintained that he had no experiences
+whatever during that period, but admits that he heard various
+knockings in his bedroom at night, which he attributed to the
+lighting of his furnace, and the resulting expansion of the
+furniture due to heat.
+
+Herbert Robinson: Herbert was the most difficult member of the Club
+from whom to secure data, but he has recently confessed that he was
+wakened one night by the light falling on to his bed from a picture
+which hung on the wall over his mantelpiece, and which stood behind
+a clock, two glass vases and a pair of candlesticks.  The door of
+his room was locked at the time.
+
+Mrs. Johnson: Had a great many minor disturbances, so that on
+rousing one night to find me closing a window against a storm she
+thought I was a spectre, and to this day insists that I only entered
+her room when I heard her scream.  For this reason I have made no
+record of her various experiences, as I felt that her nervous
+condition precluded accurate observation.
+
+As in all records of psychic phenomena, the human element must be
+considered, and I do not attempt either to analyze these various
+phenomena or to explain them.  Herbert, for instance, has been
+known to walk in his sleep.  But I respectfully offer, as opposed
+to this, that my watch has never been known to walk at all, and
+that Mrs. Johnson's bracelet could hardly be accused of an attack
+of nerves.
+
+
+
+IX
+
+
+The following day was Monday.  When I came downstairs I found a
+neat bundle lying in the hall, and addressed to me.  My wife had
+followed me down, and we surveyed it together.
+
+I had a curious feeling about the parcel, and was for cutting the
+cord with my knife.  But my wife is careful about string.  She has
+always fancied that the time would come when we would need some
+badly, and it would not be around.  I have an entire drawer of
+my chiffonier, which I really need for other uses, filled with
+bundles of twine, pink, white and brown.  I recall, on one
+occasion, packing a suit-case in the dusk, in great hasty, and
+emptying the drawer containing my undergarments into it, to
+discover, when I opened it on the train for my pajamas, nothing
+but rolls of cord and several packages of Christmas ribbons.  So
+I was obliged to wait until she had untied the knots by means of
+a hairpin.
+
+It was my overcoat!  My overcoat, apparently uninjured, but with
+the collection of keys I had made missing.
+
+The address was printed, not written, in a large, strong hand, with a
+stub pen.  I did not, at the time, notice the loss of certain papers
+which had been in the breast pocket.  I am rather absent-minded, and
+it was not until the night after the third sitting that they were
+recalled to my mind.
+
+At something after eleven Herbert Robinson called me up at my office.
+He was at Sperry's house, Sperry having been his physician during
+his recent illness.
+
+"I say, Horace, this is Herbert."
+
+"Yes.  How are you?"
+
+"Doing well, Sperry says.  I'm at his place now.  I'm speaking for
+him.  He's got a patient."
+
+"Yes."
+
+"You were here last night, he says."  Herbert has a circumlocutory
+manner over the phone which irritates me.  He begins slowly and
+does not know how to stop.  Talk with him drags on endlessly.
+
+"Well, I admit it," I snapped.  "It's not a secret."
+
+He lowered his voice.  "Do you happen to have noticed a
+walking-stick in the library when you were here?"
+
+"Which walking-stick?"
+
+"You know.  The one we--"
+
+"Yes.  I saw it."
+
+"You didn't, by any chance, take it home with you?"
+
+"No."
+
+"Are you sure?"
+
+"Certainly I'm sure."
+
+"You are an absent-minded beggar, you know," he explained.  "You
+remember about the fire-tongs.  And a stick is like an umbrella.
+One is likely to pick it up and--"
+
+"One is not likely to do anything of the sort.  At least, I didn't."
+
+"Oh, all right.  Every one well?"
+
+"Very well, thanks."
+
+"Suppose we'll see you tonight?"
+
+"Not unless you ring off and let me do some work," I said irritably.
+
+He rang off.  I was ruffled, I admit; but I was uneasy, also.  To
+tell the truth, the affair of the fire-tongs had cost me my
+self-confidence.  I called up my wife, and she said Herbert was a
+fool and Sperry also.  But she made an exhaustive search of the
+premises, without result.  Whoever had taken the stick, I was
+cleared.  Cleared, at least, for a time.  There were strange
+developments coming that threatened my peace of mind.
+
+It was that day that I discovered that I was being watched.
+Shadowed, I believe is the technical word.  I daresay I had been
+followed from my house, but I had not noticed.  When I went out
+to lunch a youngish man in a dark overcoat was waiting for the
+elevator, and I saw him again when I came out of my house.  We
+went downtown again on the same car.
+
+Perhaps I would have thought nothing of it, had I not been summoned
+to the suburbs on a piece of business concerning a mortgage.  He
+was at the far end of the platform as I took the train to return to
+the city, with his back to me.  I lost him in the crowd at the
+downtown station, but he evidently had not lost me, for, stopping
+to buy a newspaper, I turned, and, as my pause had evidently been
+unexpected, he almost ran into me.
+
+With that tendency of any man who finds himself under suspicion to
+search his past for some dereliction, possibly forgotten, I puzzled
+over the situation for some time that afternoon.  I did not connect
+it with the Wells case, for in that matter I was indisputably the
+hunter, not the hunted.
+
+Although I found no explanation for the matter, I did not tell my
+wife that evening.  Women are strange and she would, I feared,
+immediately jump to the conclusion that there was something in my
+private life that I was keeping from her.
+
+Almost all women, I have found, although not over-conscious
+themselves of the charm and attraction of their husbands, are of
+the conviction that these husbands exert a dangerous fascination
+over other women, and that this charm, which does not reveal itself
+in the home circle, is used abroad with occasionally disastrous
+effect.
+
+My preoccupation, however, did not escape my wife, and she commented
+on it at dinner.
+
+"You are generally dull, Horace," she said, "but tonight you are
+deadly."
+
+After dinner I went into our reception room, which is not lighted
+unless we are expecting guests, and peered out of the window.  The
+detective, or whoever he might be, was walking negligently up the
+street.
+
+As that was the night of the third seance, I find that my record
+covers the fact that Mrs. Dane was housecleaning, for which reason
+we had not been asked to dinner, that my wife and I dined early,
+at six-thirty, and that it was seven o'clock when Sperry called me
+by telephone.
+
+"Can you come to my office at once?" he asked.  "I dare say Mrs.
+Johnson won't mind going to the Dane house alone."
+
+"Is there anything new?"
+
+"No.  But I want to get into the Wells house
+again.  Bring the keys."
+
+"They were in the overcoat.  It came back
+today, but the keys are missing."
+
+"Did you lock the back door?"
+
+"I don't remember.  No, of course not.  I didn't have the keys."
+
+"Then there's a chance," he observed, after a moment's pause.
+"Anyhow, it's worth trying.  Herbert told you about the stick?"
+
+"Yes.  I never had it, Sperry."
+
+Fortunately, during this conversation my wife was upstairs dressing.
+I knew quite well that she would violently oppose a second visit on
+my part to the deserted house down the street.  I therefore left a
+message for her that I had gone on, and, finding the street clear,
+met Sperry at his door-step.
+
+"This is the last sitting, Horace," he explained, "and I feel we
+ought to have the most complete possible knowledge, beforehand.  We
+will be in a better position to understand what comes.  There are
+two or three things we haven't checked up on."
+
+He slipped an arm through mine, and we started down the street.
+"I'm going to get to the bottom of this, Horace, old dear," he
+said.
+
+"Remember, we're pledged to a psychic investigation only."
+
+"Rats!" he said rudely.  "We are going to find out who killed Arthur
+Wells, and if he deserves hanging we'll hang him."
+
+"Or her?"
+
+"It wasn't Elinor Wells," he said positively.  "Here's the point:
+if he's been afraid to go back for his overcoat it's still there.
+I don't expect that, however.  But the thing about the curtain
+interests me.  I've been reading over my copy of the notes on the
+sittings.  It was said, you remember, that curtains--some curtains
+--would have been better places to hide the letters than the bag."
+
+I stopped suddenly.  "By Jove, Sperry," I said.  "I remember now.
+My notes of the sittings were in my overcoat."
+
+"And they are gone?"
+
+"They are gone."
+
+He whistled softly.  "That's unfortunate," he said.  "Then the
+other person, whoever he is, knows what we know!"
+
+He was considerably startled when I told him I had been shadowed,
+and insisted that it referred directly to the case in hand.  "He's
+got your notes," he said, "and he's got to know what your next move
+is going to be."
+
+His intention, I found, was to examine the carpet outside of the
+dressing-room door, and the floor beneath it, to discover if
+possible whether Arthur Wells had fallen there and been moved.
+
+"Because I think you are right," he said.  "He wouldn't have been
+likely to shoot himself in a hall, and because the very moving of
+the body would be in itself suspicious.  Then I want to look at
+the curtains.  'The curtains would have been safer.'  Safer for
+what?  For the bag with the letters, probably, for she followed
+that with the talk about Hawkins.  He'd got them, and somebody was
+afraid he had."
+
+"Just where does Hawkins come in, Sperry?" I asked.
+
+"I'm damned if I know," he reflected.  "We may learn tonight."
+
+The Wells house was dark and forbidding.  We walked past it once,
+as an officer was making his rounds in leisurely fashion, swinging
+his night-stick in circles.  But on our return the street was empty,
+and we turned in at the side entry.
+
+I led the way with comparative familiarity.  It was, you will
+remember, my third similar excursion.  With Sperry behind me I felt
+confident.
+
+"In case the door is locked, I have a few skeleton keys," said
+Sperry.
+
+We had reached the end of the narrow passage, and emerged into the
+square of brick and grass that lay behind the house.  While the
+night was clear, the place lay in comparative darkness.  Sperry
+stumbled over something, and muttered to himself.
+
+The rear porch lay in deep shadow.  We went up the steps together.
+Then Sperry stopped, and I advanced to the doorway.  It was locked.
+
+With my hand on the door-knob, I turned to Sperry.  He was
+struggling violently with a dark figure, and even as I turned they
+went over with a crash and rolled together down the steps.  Only
+one of them rose.
+
+I was terrified.  I confess it.  It was impossible to see whether
+it was Sperry or his assailant.  If it was Sperry who lay in a heap
+on the ground, I felt that I was lost.  I could not escape.  The
+way was blocked, and behind me the door, to which I now turned
+frantically, was a barrier I could not move.
+
+Then, out of the darkness behind me, came Sperry's familiar, booming
+bass.  "I've knocked him out, I'm afraid.  Got a match, Horace?"
+
+Much shaken, I went down the steps and gave Sperry a wooden
+toothpick, under the impression that it was a match.  That rectified,
+we bent over the figure on the bricks.
+
+"Knocked out, for sure," said Sperry, "but I think it's not serious.
+A watchman, I suppose.  Poor devil, we'll have to get him into the
+house."
+
+The lock gave way to manipulation at last, and the door swung open.
+There came to us the heavy odor of all closed houses, a combination
+of carpets, cooked food, and floor wax.  My nerves, now taxed to
+their utmost, fairly shrank from it, but Sperry was cool.
+
+He bore the brunt of the weight as we carried the watchman in,
+holding him with his arms dangling, helpless and rather pathetic.
+Sperry glanced around.
+
+"Into the kitchen," he said.  "We can lock him in."
+
+We had hardly laid him on the floor when I heard the slow stride
+of the officer of the beat.  He had turned into the paved alley-way,
+and was advancing with measured, ponderous steps.  Fortunately I am
+an agile man, and thus I was able to get to the outer door, reverse
+the key and turn it from the inside, before I heard him hailing the
+watchman.
+
+"Hello there!" he called.  "George, I say!  George!"
+
+He listened for a moment, then came up and tried the door.  I
+crouched inside, as guilty as the veriest house-breaker in the
+business.  But he had no suspicion, clearly, for he turned and
+went away, whistling as he went.
+
+Not until we heard him going down the street again, absently running
+his night-stick along the fence palings, did Sperry or I move.
+
+"A narrow squeak, that," I said, mopping my face.
+
+"A miss is as good as a mile," he observed, and there was a sort of
+exultation in his voice.  He is a born adventurer.
+
+He came out into the passage and quickly locked the door behind him.
+
+"Now, friend Horace," he said, "if you have anything but toothpicks
+for matches, we will look for the overcoat, and then we will go
+upstairs."
+
+"Suppose he wakens and raises an alarm?"
+
+"We'll be out of luck.  That's all."
+
+As we had anticipated, there was no overcoat in the library, and
+after listening a moment at the kitchen door, we ascended a rear
+staircase to the upper floor.  I had, it will be remembered, fallen
+from a chair on a table in the dressing room, and had left them
+thus overturned when I charged the third floor.  The room, however,
+was now in perfect order, and when I held my candle to the ceiling,
+I perceived that the bullet hole had again been repaired, and this
+time with such skill that I could not even locate it.
+
+"We are up against some one cleverer than we are, Sperry," I
+acknowledged.
+
+"And who has more to lose than we have to gain," he added cheerfully.
+"Don't worry about that, Horace.  You're a married man and I'm not.
+If a woman wanted to hide some letters from her husband, and chose
+a curtain for a receptacle, what room would hide them in.  Not in
+his dressing-room, eh?"
+
+He took the candle and led the way to Elinor Wells's bedroom.  Here,
+however, the draperies were down, and we would have been at a loss,
+had I not remembered my wife's custom of folding draperies when we
+close the house, and placing them under the dusting sheets which
+cover the various beds.
+
+Our inspection of the curtains was hurried, and broken by various
+excursions on my part to listen for the watchman.  But he remained
+quiet below, and finally we found what we were looking for.  In
+the lining of one of the curtains, near the bottom, a long, ragged
+cut had been made.
+
+"Cut in a hurry, with curved scissors," was Sperry's comment.
+"Probably manicure scissors."
+
+The result was a sort of pocket in the curtain, concealed on the
+chintz side, which was the side which would hang toward the room.
+
+"Probably," he said, "the curtain would have been better.  It would
+have stayed anyhow.  Whereas the bag--" He was flushed with triumph.
+"How in the world would Hawkins know that?" he demanded.  "You can
+talk all you like.  She's told us things that no one ever told her."
+
+Before examining the floor in the hall I went downstairs and listened
+outside the kitchen door.  The watchman was stirring inside the room,
+and groaning occasionally.  Sperry, however, when I told him,
+remained cool and in his exultant mood, and I saw that he meant to
+vindicate Miss Jeremy if he flung me into jail and the newspapers
+while doing it.
+
+"We'll have a go at the floors under the carpets now," he said.  "If
+he gets noisy, you can go down with the fire-tongs.  I understand
+you are an expert with them."
+
+The dressing-room had a large rug, like the nursery above it, and
+turning back the carpet was a simple matter.  There had been a stain
+beneath where the dead man's head had lain, but it had been scrubbed
+and scraped away.  The boards were white for an area of a square
+foot or so.
+
+Sperry eyed the spot with indifference.  "Not essential," he said.
+"Shows good housekeeping.  That's all.  The point is, are there
+other spots?"
+
+And, after a time, we found what we were after.  The upper hall
+was carpeted, and my penknife came into requisition to lift the
+tacks.  They came up rather easily, as if but recently put in.
+That, indeed, proved to be the case.
+
+Just outside the dressing-room door the boards for an area of two
+square feet or more beneath the carpet had been scraped and
+scrubbed.  With the lifting of the carpet came, too, a strong odor,
+as of ammonia.  But the stain of blood had absolutely disappeared.
+
+Sperry, kneeling on the floor with the candle held close, examined
+the wood.  "Not only scrubbed," he said, "but scraped down, probably
+with a floor-scraper.  It's pretty clear, Horace.  The poor devil
+fell here.  There was a struggle, and he went down.  He lay there
+for a while, too, until some plan was thought out.  A man does
+not usually kill himself in a hallway.  It's a sort of solitary
+deed.  He fell here, and was dragged into the room.  The angle of
+the bullet in the ceiling would probably show it came from here,
+too, and went through the doorway."
+
+We were startled at that moment by a loud banging below.  Sperry
+leaped to his feet and caught up his hat.
+
+"The watchman," he said.  "We'd better get out.  He'll have all the
+neighbors in at that rate."
+
+He was still hammering on the door as we went down the rear stairs,
+and Sperry stood outside the door and to one side.
+
+"Keep out of range, Horace," he cautioned me.  And to the watchman:
+
+"Now, George, we will put the key under the door, and in ten minutes
+you may come out.  Don't come sooner.  I've warned you."
+
+By the faint light from outside I could see him stooping, not in
+front of the door, but behind it.  And it was well he did, for the
+moment the key was on the other side, a shot zipped through one
+of the lower panels.  I had not expected it and it set me to
+shivering.
+
+"No more of that, George," said Sperry calmly and cheerfully.  "This
+is a quiet neighborhood, and we don't like shooting.  What is more,
+my friend here is very expert with his own particular weapon, and at
+any moment he may go to the fire-place in the library and--"
+
+I have no idea why Sperry chose to be facetious at that time, and
+my resentment rises as I record it.  For when we reached the yard
+we heard the officer running along the alley-way, calling as he ran.
+
+"The fence, quick," Sperry said.
+
+I am not very good at fences, as a rule, but I leaped that one like
+a cat, and came down in a barrel of waste-paper on the other side.
+Getting me out was a breathless matter, finally accomplished by
+turning the barrel over so that I could crawl out.  We could hear
+the excited voices of the two men beyond the fence, and we ran.  I
+was better than Sperry at that.  I ran like a rabbit.  I never even
+felt my legs.  And Sperry pounded on behind me.
+
+We heard, behind us, one of the men climbing the fence.  But in
+jumping down he seemed to have struck the side of the overturned
+barrel.  Probably it rolled and threw him, for that part of my mind
+which was not intent on flight heard him fall, and curse loudly.
+
+"Go to it," Sperry panted behind me.  "Roll over and break your
+neck."
+
+This, I need hardly explain, was meant for our pursuer.
+
+We turned a corner and were out on one of the main thoroughfares.
+Instantly, so innate is cunning to the human brain, we fell to
+walking sedately.
+
+It was as well that we did, for we had not gone a half block before
+we saw our policeman again, lumbering toward us and blowing a
+whistle as he ran.
+
+"Stop and get this street-car," Sperry directed me.  "And don't
+breathe so hard."
+
+The policeman stared at us fixedly, stopping to do so, but all he
+saw was two well-dressed and professional-looking men, one of them
+rather elderly who was hailing a street-car.  I had the presence of
+mind to draw my watch and consult it.
+
+"Just in good time," I said distinctly, and we mounted the car step.
+Sperry remained on the platform and lighted a cigar.  This gave him
+a chance to look back.
+
+"Rather narrow squeak, that," he observed, as he came in and sat
+down beside me.  "Your gray hairs probably saved us."
+
+I was quite numb from the waist down, from my tumble and from
+running, and it was some time before I could breathe quietly.
+Suddenly Sperry fell to laughing.
+
+"I wish you could have seen yourself in that barrel, and crawling
+out," he said.
+
+We reached Mrs. Dane's, to find that Miss Jeremy had already arrived,
+looking rather pale, as I had noticed she always did before a seance.
+Her color had faded, and her eyes seemed sunken in her head.
+
+"Not ill, are you?" Sperry asked her, as he took her hand.
+
+"Not at all.  But I am anxious.  I always am.  These things do not
+come for the calling."
+
+"This is the last time.  You have promised."
+
+"Yes.  The last time."
+
+
+
+X
+
+
+It appeared that Herbert Robinson had been reading, during his
+convalescence, a considerable amount of psychic literature, and
+that we were to hold this third and final sitting under test
+conditions.  As before, the room had been stripped of furniture,
+and the cloth and rod which formed the low screen behind Miss
+Jeremy's chair were not of her own providing, but Herbert's.
+
+He had also provided, for some reason or other, eight small glass
+cups, into which he placed the legs of the two tables, and in a
+business-like manner he set out on the large stand a piece of white
+paper, a pencil, and a spool of black thread.  It is characteristic
+of Miss Jeremy, and of her own ignorance of the methods employed
+in professional seances, that she was as much interested and
+puzzled as we were.
+
+When he had completed his preparations, Herbert made a brief speech.
+
+"Members of the Neighborhood Club," he said impressively, "we have
+agreed among ourselves that this is to be our last meeting for the
+purpose that is before us.  I have felt, therefore, that in justice
+to the medium this final seance should leave us with every
+conviction of its genuineness.  Whatever phenomena occur, the medium
+must be, as she has been, above suspicion.  For the replies of her
+'control,' no particular precaution seems necessary, or possible.
+But the first seance divided itself into two parts: an early period
+when, so far as we could observe, the medium was at least partly
+conscious, possibly fully so, when physical demonstrations occurred.
+And a second, or trance period, during which we received replies to
+questions.  It is for the physical phenomena that I am about to take
+certain precautions."
+
+"Are you going to tie me?" Miss Jeremy asked.
+
+"Do you object?"
+
+"Not at all.  But with what?"
+
+"With silk thread," Herbert said, smilingly.
+
+She held out her wrists at once, but Herbert placed her in her chair,
+and proceeded to wrap her, chair and all, in a strong network of fine
+threads, drawn sufficiently taut to snap with any movement.
+
+He finished by placing her feet on the sheet of paper, and outlining
+their position there with a pencil line.
+
+The proceedings were saved from absurdity by what we all felt was
+the extreme gravity of the situation.  There were present in the
+room Mrs. Dane, the Robinsons, Sperry, my wife and myself.  Clara,
+Mrs. Dane's secretary, had begged off on the plea of nervousness
+from the earlier and physical portion of the seance, and was to
+remain outside in the hall until the trance commenced.
+
+Sperry objected to this, as movement in the circle during the
+trance had, in the first seance, induced fretful uneasiness in the
+medium.  But Clara, appealed to, begged to be allowed to remain
+outside until she was required, and showed such unmistakable
+nervousness that we finally agreed.
+
+"Would a slight noise disturb her?" Mrs. Dane asked.
+
+Miss Jeremy thought not, if the circle remained unbroken, and Mrs.
+Dane considered.
+
+"Bring me my stick from the hall, Horace," she said.  "And tell
+Clara I'll rap on the floor with it when I want her."
+
+I found a stick in the rack outside and brought it in.  The lights
+were still on in the chandelier overhead, and as I gave the stick
+to Mrs. Dane I heard Sperry speaking sharply behind me.
+
+"Where did you get that stick?" he demanded.
+
+"In the hall.  I--"
+
+"I never saw it before," said Mrs. Dane.  "Perhaps it is Herbert's."
+
+But I caught Sperry's eye.  We had both recognized it.  It was
+Arthur Wells's, the one which Sperry had taken from his room, and
+which, in turn, had been taken from Sperry's library.
+
+Sperry was watching me with a sort of cynical amusement.
+
+"You're an absent-minded beggar, Horace," he said.
+
+"You didn't, by any chance, stop here on your way back from my place
+the other night, did you?"
+
+"I did.  But I didn't bring that thing."
+
+"Look here, Horace," he said, more gently, "you come in and see me
+some day soon.  You're not as fit as you ought to be."
+
+I confess to a sort of helpless indignation that was far from the
+composure the occasion required.  But the others, I believe, were
+fully convinced that no human agency had operated to bring the
+stick into Mrs. Dane's house, a belief that prepared them for
+anything that might occur.
+
+A number of things occurred almost as soon as the lights were out,
+interrupting a train of thought in which I saw myself in the first
+stages of mental decay, and carrying about the streets not only
+fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging
+to my friends.
+
+Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium.  She was uneasy
+and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight.  She
+was distinctly fretful.  But after a time she settled down in her
+chair.  Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room,
+seemed sagged--seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller.  But there
+was none of the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.
+
+Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond
+the black curtain commenced to ring.  It rang at first gently, then
+violently.  It made a hideous clamor.  I had a curious sense that
+it was ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain.  It was a
+relief to have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.
+
+Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me.
+"I am being turned around," I said, in a low tone.  "It as if
+something has taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting
+it.  It has stopped now."  I had been turned fully a quarter round.
+
+For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table
+before me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain
+appeared to swell, as in a wind.
+
+"There is something behind it," Alice Robinson said, in a terrorized
+tone.  "Something behind it, moving."
+
+"It is not possible," Herbert assured her.  "Nothing, that is--
+there is only one door, and it is closed.  I have examined the walls
+and floor carefully."
+
+At the end of five minutes something soft and fragrant fell on to
+the table near me.  I had not noticed Herbert when he placed the
+flowers from Mrs. Dane's table on the stand, and I was more
+startled than the others.  Then the glass prisms in the chandelier
+over our heads clinked together, as if they had been swept by a
+finger.  More of the flowers came.  We were pelted with them.  And
+into the quiet that followed there came a light, fine but steady
+tattoo on the table in our midst.  Then at last silence, and the
+medium in deep trance, and Mrs. Dane rapping on the floor for
+Clara.
+
+When Clara came in, Mrs. Dane told her to switch on the lights.
+Miss Jeremy had dropped in her chair until the silk across her
+chest was held taut.  But investigation showed that none of the
+threads were broken and that her evening slippers still fitted
+into the outline on the paper beneath them.  Without getting up,
+Sperry reached to the stand behind Miss Jeremy, and brought into
+view a piece of sculptor's clay he had placed there.  The handle
+of the bell was now jammed into the mass.  He had only time to
+show it to us when the medium began to speak.
+
+I find, on re-reading the earlier part of this record, that I have
+omitted mention of Miss Jeremy's "control."  So suddenly had we
+jumped, that first evening, into the trail that led us to the Wells
+case, that beyond the rather raucous "good-evening," and possibly
+the extraneous matter referring to Mother Goose and so on, we had
+been saved the usual preliminary patter of the average control.
+
+On this night, however, we were obliged to sit impatiently through
+a rambling discourse, given in a half-belligerent manner, on the
+deterioration of moral standards.  Re-reading Clara's notes, I find
+that the subject matter is without originality and the diction
+inferior.  But the lecture ceased abruptly, and the time for
+questions had come.
+
+"Now," Herbert said, "we want you to go back to the house where you
+saw the dead man on the floor.  You know his name, don't you?"
+
+There was a pause.  "Yes.  Of course I do. A. L. Wells."
+
+Arthur had been known to most of us by his Christian name, but the
+initials were correct.
+
+"How do you know it is an L.?"
+
+"On letters," was the laconic answer.  Then:  "Letters, letters,
+who has the letters?"
+
+"Do you know whose cane this is?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Will you tell us?"
+
+Up to that time the replies had come easily and quickly.  But
+beginning with the cane question, the medium was in difficulties.
+She moved uneasily, and spoke irritably.  The replies were slow and
+grudging.  Foreign subjects were introduced, as now.
+
+"Horace's wife certainly bullies him," said the voice.  "He's afraid
+of her.  And the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs--the fire-tongs!"
+
+"Whose cane is this?" Herbert repeated.
+
+"Mr. Ellingham's."
+
+This created a profound sensation.
+
+"How do you know that?"
+
+"He carried it at the seashore.  He wrote in the sand with it."
+
+"What did he write?"
+
+"Ten o'clock."
+
+"He wrote 'ten o'clock' in the sand, and the waves came and washed
+it away?"
+
+"Yes."
+
+"Horace," said my wife, leaning forward, "why not ask her about that
+stock of mine?  If it is going down, I ought to sell, oughtn't I?"
+
+Herbert eyed her with some exasperation.
+
+"We are here to make a serious investigation," he said.  "If the
+members of the club will keep their attention on what we are doing,
+we may get somewhere.  Now," to the medium, "the man is dead, and
+the revolver is beside him.  Did he kill himself?"
+
+"No.  He attacked her when he found the letters."
+
+"And she shot him?"
+
+"I can't tell you that."
+
+"Try very hard.  It is important."
+
+"I don't know," was the fretful reply.  "She may have.  She hated
+him.  I don't know.  She says she did."
+
+"She says she killed him?"
+
+But there was no reply to this, although Herbert repeated it several
+times.
+
+Instead, the voice of the "control" began to recite a verse of
+poetry--a cheap, sentimental bit of trash.  It was maddening, under
+the circumstances.
+
+"Do you know where the letters are?"
+
+"Hawkins has them."
+
+"They were not hidden in the curtain?"  This was Sperry.
+
+"No.  The police might have searched the room."
+
+"Where were these letters?"
+
+There was no direct reply to this, but instead:
+
+"He found them when he was looking for his razorstrop.  They were
+in the top of a closet.  His revolver was there, too.  He went
+back and got it.  It was terrible."
+
+There was a profound silence, followed by a slight exclamation from
+Sperry as he leaped to his feet.  The screen at the end of the room,
+which cut off the light from Clara's candle, was toppling.  The next
+instant it fell, and we saw Clara sprawled over her table, in a dead
+faint.
+
+
+
+XI
+
+
+In this, the final chapter of the record of these seances, I shall
+give, as briefly as possible, the events of the day following the
+third sitting.  I shall explain the mystery of Arthur Wells's death,
+and I shall give the solution arrived at by the Neighborhood Club
+as to the strange communications from the medium, Miss Jeremy, now
+Sperry's wife.
+
+But there are some things I cannot explain.  Do our spirits live on,
+on this earth plane, now and then obedient to the wills of those
+yet living?  Is death, then, only a gateway into higher space, from
+which, through the open door of a "sensitive" mind, we may be
+brought back on occasion to commit the inadequate absurdities of the
+physical seance?
+
+Or is Sperry right, and do certain individuals manifest powers of
+a purely physical nature, but powers which Sperry characterizes as
+the survival of some long-lost development by which at one time we
+knew how to liberate a forgotten form of energy?
+
+Who can say?  We do not know.  We have had to accept these things
+as they have been accepted through the ages, and give them either a
+spiritual or a purely natural explanation, as our minds happen to
+be adventurous or analytic in type.
+
+But outside of the purely physical phenomena of those seances, we
+are provided with an explanation which satisfies the Neighborhood
+Club, even if it fails to satisfy the convinced spiritist.  We have
+been accused merely of substituting one mystery for another, but I
+reply by saying that the mystery we substitute is not a mystery,
+but an acknowledged fact.
+
+On Tuesday morning I wakened after an uneasy night.  I knew certain
+things, knew them definitely in the clear light of morning.  Hawkins
+had the letters that Arthur Wells had found; that was one thing.  I
+had not taken Ellingham's stick to Mrs. Dane's house; that was
+another.  I had not done it.  I had placed it on the table and
+had not touched it again.
+
+But those were immaterial, compared with one outstanding fact.  Any
+supernatural solution would imply full knowledge by whatever power
+had controlled the medium.  And there was not full knowledge.  There
+was, on the contrary, a definite place beyond which the medium could
+not go.
+
+She did not know who had killed Arthur Wells.
+
+To my surprise, Sperry and Herbert Robinson came together to see me
+that morning at my office.  Sperry, like myself, was pale and tired,
+but Herbert was restless and talkative, for all the world like a
+terrier on the scent of a rat.
+
+They had brought a newspaper account of an attempt by burglars to
+rob the Wells house, and the usual police formula that arrests
+were expected to be made that day.  There was a diagram of the
+house, and a picture of the kitchen door, with an arrow indicating
+the bullet-hole.
+
+"Hawkins will be here soon," Sperry said, rather casually, after I
+had read the clipping.
+
+"Here?"
+
+"Yes.  He is bringing a letter from Miss Jeremy.  The letter is
+merely a blind.  We want to see him."
+
+Herbert was examining the door of my office.  He set the spring
+lock.  "He may try to bolt," he explained.  "We're in this pretty
+deep, you know."
+
+"How about a record of what he says?" Sperry asked.
+
+I pressed a button, and Miss Joyce came in.  "Take the testimony
+of the man who is coming in, Miss Joyce," I directed.  "Take
+everything we say, any of us.  Can you tell the different voices?"
+
+She thought she could, and took up her position in the next room,
+with the door partly open.
+
+I can still see Hawkins as Sperry let him in--a tall, cadaverous
+man of good manners and an English accent, a superior servant.  He
+was cool but rather resentful.  I judged that he considered carrying
+letters as in no way a part of his work, and that he was careful of
+his dignity.  "Miss Jeremy sent this, sir," he said.
+
+Then his eyes took in Sperry and Herbert, and he drew himself up.
+
+"I see," he said.  "It wasn't the letter, then?"
+
+"Not entirely.  We want to have a talk with you, Hawkins."
+
+"Very well, sir."  But his eyes went from one to the other of us.
+
+"You were in the employ of Mr. Wells.  We know that.  Also we saw
+you there the night he died, but some time after his death.  What
+time did you get in that night?"
+
+"About midnight.  I am not certain."
+
+"Who told you of what had happened?"
+
+"I told you that before.  I met the detectives going out."
+
+"Exactly.  Now, Hawkins, you had come in, locked the door, and
+placed the key outside for the other servants?"
+
+"Yes, sir."
+
+"How do you expect us to believe that?"  Sperry demanded irritably.
+"There was only one key.  Could you lock yourself in and then place
+the key outside?"
+
+"Yes, sir," he replied impassively.  "By opening the kitchen window,
+I could reach out and hang it on the nail."
+
+"You were out of the house, then, at the time Mr. Wells died?"
+
+"I can prove it by as many witnesses as you wish to call."
+
+"Now, about these letters, Hawkins," Sperry said.  "The letters in
+the bag.  Have you still got them?"
+
+He half rose--we had given him a chair facing the light--and then
+sat down again.  "What letters?"
+
+"Don't beat about the bush.  We know you have the letters.  And we
+want them."
+
+"I don't intend to give them up, sir."
+
+"Will you tell us how you got them?"  He hesitated.  "If you do
+not know already, I do not care to say."
+
+I placed the letter to A 31 before him.  "You wrote this, I think?"
+I said.
+
+He was genuinely startled.  More than that, indeed, for his face
+twitched.  "Suppose I did?" he said, "I'm not admitting it."
+
+"Will you tell us for whom it was meant?"
+
+"You know a great deal already, gentlemen.  Why not find that out
+from where you learned the rest?"
+
+"You know, then, where we learned what we know?"
+
+"That's easy," he said bitterly.  "She's told you enough, I daresay.
+She doesn't know it all, of course.  Any more than I do," he added.
+
+"Will you give us the letters?"
+
+"I haven't said I have them.  I haven't admitted I wrote that one
+on the desk.  Suppose I have them, I'll not give them up except to
+the District Attorney."
+
+"By 'she' do you refer to Miss Jeremy?" I asked.
+
+He stared at me, and then smiled faintly.
+
+"You know who I mean."
+
+We tried to assure him that we were not, in a sense, seeking to
+involve him in the situation, and I even went so far as to state
+our position, briefly:
+
+"I'd better explain, Hawkins.  We are not doing police work.  But,
+owing to a chain of circumstances, we have learned that Mr. Wells
+did not kill himself.  He was murdered, or at least shot, by some
+one else.  It may not have been deliberate.  Owing to what we have
+learned, certain people are under suspicion.  We want to clear things
+up for our own satisfaction."
+
+"Then why is some one taking down what I say in the next room?"
+
+He could only have guessed it, but he saw that he was right, by
+our faces.  He smiled bitterly.  "Go on," he said.  "Take it down.
+It can't hurt anybody.  I don't know who did it, and that's God's
+truth."
+
+And, after long wrangling, that was as far as we got.
+
+He suspected who had done it, but he did not know.  He absolutely
+refused to surrender the letters in his possession, and a sense
+of delicacy, I think, kept us all from pressing the question of
+the A 31 matter.
+
+"That's a personal affair," he said.  "I've had a good bit of
+trouble.  I'm thinking now of going back to England."
+
+And, as I say, we did not insist.
+
+When he had gone, there seemed to be nothing to say.  He had left
+the same impression on all of us, I think--of trouble, but not of
+crime.  Of a man fairly driven; of wretchedness that was almost
+despair.  He still had the letters.  He had, after all, as much
+right to them as we had, which was, actually, no right at all.  And,
+whatever it was, he still had his secret.
+
+Herbert was almost childishly crestfallen.  Sperry's attitude was
+more philosophical.
+
+"A woman, of course," he said.  "The A 31 letter shows it.  He
+tried to get her back, perhaps, by holding the letters over her
+head.  And it hasn't worked out.  Poor devil!  Only--who is the
+woman?"
+
+It was that night, the fifteenth day after the crime, that the
+solution came.  Came as a matter of fact, to my door.
+
+I was in the library, reading, or trying to read, a rather abstruse
+book on psychic phenomena.  My wife, I recall, had just asked me
+to change a banjo record for "The End of a Pleasant Day," when the
+bell rang.
+
+In our modest establishment the maids retire early, and it is my
+custom, on those rare occasions when the bell rings after nine
+o'clock, to answer the door myself.
+
+To my surprise, it was Sperry, accompanied by two ladies, one of
+them heavily veiled.  It was not until I had ushered them into the
+reception room and lighted the gas that I saw who they were.  It
+was Elinor Wells, in deep mourning, and Clara, Mrs. Dane's companion
+and secretary.
+
+I am afraid I was rather excited, for I took Sperry's hat from him,
+and placed it on the head of a marble bust which I had given my
+wife on our last anniversary, and Sperry says that I drew a
+smoking-stand up beside Elinor Wells with great care.  I do not
+know.  It has, however, passed into history in the Club, where
+every now and then for some time Herbert offered one of the ladies
+a cigar, with my compliments.
+
+My wife, I believe, was advancing along the corridor when Sperry
+closed the door.  As she had only had time to see that a woman was
+in the room, she was naturally resentful, and retired to the upper
+floor, where I found her considerably upset, some time later.
+
+While I am quite sure that I was not thinking clearly at the
+opening of the interview, I know that I was puzzled at the presence
+of Mrs. Dane's secretary, but I doubtless accepted it as having
+some connection with Clara's notes.  And Sperry, at the beginning,
+made no comment on her at all.
+
+"Mrs. Wells suggested that we come here, Horace," he began.  "We
+may need a legal mind on this.  I'm not sure, or rather I think it
+unlikely.  But just in case--suppose you tell him, Elinor."
+
+I have no record of the story Elinor Wells told that night in our
+little reception-room, with Clara sitting in a corner, grave and
+white.  It was fragmentary, inco-ordinate.  But I got it all at
+last.
+
+Charlie Ellingham had killed Arthur Wells, but in a struggle.  In
+parts the story was sordid enough.  She did not spare herself, or
+her motives.  She had wanted luxury, and Arthur had not succeeded
+as he had promised.  They were in debt, and living beyond their
+means.  But even that, she hastened to add, would not have mattered,
+had he not been brutal with her.  He had made her life very wretched.
+
+But on the subject of Charlie Ellingham she was emphatic.  She knew
+that there had been talk, but there had been no real basis for it.
+She had turned to him for comfort, and he gave her love.  She didn't
+know where he was now, and didn't greatly care, but she would like
+to recover and destroy some letters he had written her.
+
+She was looking crushed and ill, and she told her story
+inco-ordinately and nervously.  Reduced to its elements, it was
+as follows:
+
+On the night of Arthur Wells's death they were dressing for a ball.
+She had made a private arrangement with Ellingham to plead a
+headache at the last moment and let Arthur go alone.  But he had
+been so insistent that she had been forced to go, after all.  She
+had sent the governess, Suzanne Gautier, out to telephone Ellingham
+not to come, but he was not at his house, and the message was left
+with his valet.  As it turned out, he had already started.
+
+Elinor was dressed, all but her ball-gown, and had put on a
+negligee, to wait for the governess to return and help her.  Arthur
+was in his dressing-room, and she heard him grumbling about having
+no blades for his safety razor.
+
+He got out a case of razors and searched for the strop.  When she
+remembered where the strop was, it was too late.  The letters had
+been beside it, and he was coming toward her, with them in his hand.
+
+She was terrified.  He had read only one, but that was enough.  He
+muttered something and turned away.  She saw his face as he went
+toward where the revolver had been hidden from the children, and
+she screamed.
+
+Charlie Ellingham heard her.  The door had been left unlocked by
+the governess, and he was in the lower hall.  He ran up and the
+two men grappled.  The first shot was fired by Arthur.  It struck
+the ceiling.  The second she was doubtful about.  She thought the
+revolver was still in Arthur's hand.  It was all horrible.  He went
+down like a stone, in the hallway outside the door.
+
+They were nearly mad, the two of them.  They had dragged the body
+in, and then faced each other.  Ellingham was for calling the
+police at once and surrendering, but she had kept him away from
+the telephone.  She maintained, and I think it very possible, that
+her whole thought was for the children, and the effect on their
+after lives of such a scandal.  And, after all, nothing could help
+the man on the floor.
+
+It was while they were trying to formulate some concerted plan
+that they heard footsteps below, and, thinking it was Mademoiselle
+Gautier, she drove Ellingham into the rear of the house, from which
+later he managed to escape.  But it was Clara who was coming up
+the stairs.
+
+"She had been our first governess for the children," Elinor said,
+"and she often came in.  She had made a birthday smock for Buddy,
+and she had it in her hand.  She almost fainted.  I couldn't tell
+her about Charlie Ellingham.  I couldn't.  I told her we had been
+struggling, and that I was afraid I had shot him.  She is quick.
+She knew just what to do.  We worked fast.  She said a suicide
+would not have fired one shot into the ceiling, and she fixed that.
+It was terrible.  And all the time he lay there, with his eyes
+half open--"
+
+The letters, it seems, were all over the place.  Elinor thought
+of the curtain, cut a receptacle for them, but she was afraid of
+the police.  Finally she gave them to Clara, who was to take them
+away and burn them.
+
+They did everything they could think of, all the time listening
+for Suzanne Gautier's return; filled the second empty chamber of
+the revolver, dragged the body out of the hall and washed the
+carpet, and called Doctor Sperry, knowing that he was at Mrs.
+Dane's and could not come.
+
+Clara had only a little time, and with the letters in her handbag
+she started down the stairs.  There she heard some one, possibly
+Ellingham, on the back stairs, and in her haste, she fell, hurting
+her knee, and she must have dropped the handbag at that time.  They
+knew now that Hawkins had found it later on.  But for a few days
+they didn't know, and hence the advertisement.
+
+"I think we would better explain Hawkins," Sperry said.  "Hawkins
+was married to Miss Clara here, some years ago, while she was with
+Mrs. Wells.  They had kept it a secret, and recently she has broken
+with him."
+
+"He was infatuated with another woman," Clara said briefly.  "That's
+a personal matter.  It has nothing to do with this case."
+
+"It explains Hawkins's letter."
+
+"It doesn't explain how that medium knew everything that happened,"
+Clara put in, excitedly.  "She knew it all, even the library paste!
+I can tell you, Mr. Johnson, I was close to fainting a dozen times
+before I finally did it."
+
+"Did you know of our seances?" I asked Mrs. Wells.
+
+"Yes.  I may as well tell you that I haven't been in Florida.  How
+could I?  The children are there, but I--"
+
+"Did you tell Charlie Ellingham about them?"
+
+"After the second one I warned him, and I think he went to the
+house.  One bullet was somewhere in the ceiling, or in the floor of
+the nursery.  I thought it ought to be found.  I don't know whether
+he found it or not.  I've been afraid to see him."
+
+She sat, clasping and unclasping her hands in her lap.  She was a
+proud woman, and surrender had come hard.  The struggle was marked
+in her face.  She looked as though she had not slept for days.
+
+"You think I am frightened," she said slowly.  "And I am, terribly
+frightened.  But not about discovery.  That has come, and cannot be
+helped."
+
+"Then why?"
+
+"How does this woman, this medium, know these things?"  Her voice
+rose, with an unexpected hysterical catch.  "It is superhuman.  I
+am almost mad."
+
+"We're going to get to the bottom of this," Sperry said soothingly.
+"Be sure that it is not what you think it is, Elinor.  There's a
+simple explanation, and I think I've got it.  What about the stick
+that was taken from my library?"
+
+"Will you tell me how you came to have it, doctor?"
+
+"Yes.  I took it from the lower hall the night--the night it
+happened."
+
+"It was Charlie Ellingham's.  He had left it there.  We had to
+have it, doctor.  Alone it might not mean much, but with the other
+things you knew--tell them, Clara."
+
+"I stole it from your office," Clara said, looking straight ahead.
+"We had to have it.  I knew at the second sitting that it was his."
+
+"When did you take it?"
+
+"On Monday morning, I went for Mrs. Dane's medicine, and you had
+promised her a book.  Do you remember?  I told your man, and he
+allowed me to go up to the library.  It was there, on the table.
+I had expected to have to search for it, but it was lying out.  I
+fastened it to my belt, under my long coat."
+
+"And placed it in the rack at Mrs. Dane's?"  Sperry was watching
+her intently, with the same sort of grim intentness he wears when
+examining a chest.
+
+"I put it in the closet in my room.  I meant to get rid of it,
+when I had a little time.  I don't know how it got downstairs, but
+I think--"
+
+"Yes?"
+
+"We are house-cleaning.  A housemaid was washing closets.  I
+suppose she found it and, thinking it was one of Mrs. Dane's,
+took it downstairs.  That is, unless--"  It was clear that, like
+Elinor, she had a supernatural explanation in her mind.  She
+looked gaunt and haggard.
+
+"Mr. Ellingham was anxious to get it," she finished.  "He had taken
+Mr. Johnson's overcoat by mistake one night when you were both in
+the house, and the notes were in it.  He saw that the stick was
+important."
+
+"Clara," Sperry asked, "did you see, the day you advertised for
+your bag, another similar advertisement?"
+
+"I saw it.  It frightened me."
+
+"You have no idea who inserted it?"
+
+"None whatever."
+
+"Did you ever see Miss Jeremy before the first sitting?  Or hear
+of her?"
+
+"Never."
+
+"Or between the seances?"
+
+Elinor rose and drew her veil down.  "We must go," she said.
+"Surely now you will cease these terrible investigations.  I cannot
+stand much more.  I am going mad."
+
+"There will be no more seances," Sperry said gravely.
+
+"What are you going to do?"  She turned to me, I daresay because
+I represented what to her was her supreme dread, the law.
+
+"My dear girl," I said, "we are not going to do anything.  The
+Neighborhood Club has been doing a little amateur research work,
+which is now over.  That is all."
+
+Sperry took them away in his car, but he turned on the door-step,
+"Wait downstairs for me," he said, "I am coming back."
+
+I remained in the library until he returned, uneasily pacing the
+floor.
+
+For where were we, after all?  We had had the medium's story
+elaborated and confirmed, but the fact remained that, step by
+step, through her unknown "control" the Neighborhood Club had
+followed a tragedy from its beginning, or almost its beginning,
+to its end.
+
+Was everything on which I had built my life to go?  Its philosophy,
+its science, even its theology, before the revelations of a young
+woman who knew hardly the rudiments of the very things she was
+destroying?
+
+Was death, then, not peace and an awakening to new things, but a
+wretched and dissociated clutching after the old?  A wrench which
+only loosened but did not break our earthly ties?
+
+It was well that Sperry came back when he did, bringing with him
+a breath of fresh night air and stalwart sanity.  He found me still
+pacing the room.
+
+"The thing I want to know," I said fretfully, "is where this leaves
+us?  Where are we?  For God's sake, where are we?"
+
+"First of all," he said, "have you anything to drink?  Not for me.
+For yourself.  You look sick."
+
+"We do not keep intoxicants in the house."
+
+"Oh, piffle," he said.  "Where is it, Horace?"
+
+"I have a little gin."
+
+"Where?"
+
+I drew a chair before the book-shelves, which in our old-fashioned
+house reach almost to the ceiling, and, withdrawing a volume of
+Josephus, I brought down the bottle.
+
+"Now and then, when I have had a bad day," I explained, "I find
+that it makes me sleep."
+
+He poured out some and I drank it, being careful to rinse the
+glass afterward.
+
+"Well," said Sperry, when he had lighted a cigar.  "So you want
+to know where we are."
+
+"I would like to save something out of the wreck."
+
+"That's easy.  Horace, you should be a heart specialist, and I
+should have taken the law.  It's as plain as the alphabet."  He
+took his notes of the sittings from his pocket.  "I'm going to
+read a few things.  Keep what is left of your mind on them.  This
+is the first sitting.
+
+"'The knee hurts.  It is very bad.  Arnica will take the pain out.'
+
+"I want to go out.  I want air.  If I could only go to sleep and
+forget it.  The drawing-room furniture is scattered all over the
+house."
+
+"Now the second sitting:
+
+"'It is writing.' (The stick.) 'It is writing, but the water washed
+it away.  All of it, not a trace.' 'If only the pocketbook were not
+lost.  Car-tickets and letters.  It will be terrible if the letters
+are found.' 'Hawkins may have it.  The curtain was much safer.'
+'That part's safe enough, unless it made a hole in the floor above.'"
+
+"Oh, if you're going to read a lot of irrelevant material--"
+
+"Irrelevant nothing!  Wake up, Horace!  But remember this.  I'm not
+explaining the physical phenomena.  We'll never do that.  It wasn't
+extraordinary, as such things go.  Our little medium in a trance
+condition has read poor Clara's mind.  It's all here, all that
+Clara knew and nothing that she didn't know.  A mind-reader, friend
+Horace.  And Heaven help me when I marry her!"
+
+********
+
+As I have said, the Neighborhood Club ended its investigations with
+this conclusion, which I believe is properly reached.  It is only
+fair to state that there are those among us who have accepted that
+theory in the Wells case, but who have preferred to consider that
+behind both it and the physical phenomena of the seances there was
+an intelligence which directed both, an intelligence not of this
+world as we know it.  Both Herbert and Alice Robinson are now
+pronounced spiritualists, although Miss Jeremy, now Mrs. Sperry,
+has definitely abandoned all investigative work.
+
+Personally, I have evolved no theory.  It seems beyond dispute that
+certain individuals can read minds, and that these same, or other
+so-called "sensitives," are capable of liberating a form of invisible
+energy which, however, they turn to no further account than the
+useless ringing of bells, moving of small tables, and flinging about
+of divers objects.
+
+To me, I admit, the solution of the Wells case as one of mind-reading
+is more satisfactory than explanatory.  For mental waves remain a
+mystery, acknowledged, as is electricity, but of a nature yet
+unrevealed.  Thoughts are things.  That is all we know.
+
+Mrs. Dane, I believe, had suspected the solution from the start.
+
+The Neighborhood Club has recently disbanded.  We tried other things,
+but we had been spoiled.  Our Kipling winter was a failure.  We read
+a play or two, with Sperry's wife reading the heroine, and the rest
+of us taking other parts.  She has a lovely voice, has Mrs. Sperry.
+But it was all stale and unprofitable, after the Wells affair.  With
+Herbert on a lecture tour on spirit realism, and Mrs. Dane at a
+sanatorium for the winter, we have now given it up, and my wife and
+I spend our Monday evenings at home.
+
+After dinner I read, or, as lately, I have been making this record
+of the Wells case from our notes.  My wife is still fond of the
+phonograph, and even now, as I make this last entry and complete my
+narrative, she is waiting for me to change the record.  I will be
+frank.  I hate the phonograph.  I hope it will be destroyed, or
+stolen.  I am thinking very seriously of having it stolen.
+
+"Horace," says my wife, "whatever would we do without the phonograph?
+I wish you would put it in the burglar-insurance policy.  I am always
+afraid it will be stolen."
+
+Even here, you see!  Truly thoughts are things.
+
+
+
+
+
+End of Project Gutenberg's Etext Sight Unseen, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
+
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