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, 

 Prev. P 36/96 next