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 

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