and stared at the portrait. “The questions will come later on. I haven’t got them ready yet. By the way, Edith, that’s Millicent over the fireplace. He’s been trying to tell me something ever since we came into the house; what you call a speaking likeness. Now I’ve got it, and he’s trying to smile.”

“I wish you wouldn’t go on like that, Jack. Please don’t.”

“It’s nothing in the world to be nervous about. This sort of thing is going on all the time around all of us. Some see it, and others don’t.”

“But how did you know?” she asked nervously.

“Can’t tell you that; it’s not a matter of reason or information. Some people call it the influence of the inanimate, which is rather a bald way of putting it. I’ve got the idea that it’s the permanence of things that are universally put down as lost, or at any rate as only transient. Just imagine, for instance, that nothing is really lost, but that everything, every act and motion, and even word, is registered in some kind of extraordinarily delicate vibration, so delicate that it is quite imperceptible to the average person. But the record is there nevertheless; in fact the entire universe is throbbing and quivering with such records that he who can may read, or at least perceive. Go a little further and admit that the more tense the act or word the more keen the pitch of the ethereal record, and one begins to appreciate what is really implied by what we call coincidence, and how it is that often, after many years, mysteries are solved that long baffled any approach to solution. It really means that some one was sensitive enough to decipher the record that was always there. I’ve an idea it may turn out like that in the case of Millicent. And when you ask me how I knew some one died suddenly in this room, I can’t answer in any other way than this. I just knew; that’s all.”

Edith felt utterly confused. She was a practical girl, with a healthy dislike of anything that might upset the normal progress of every-day affairs, and for years had stood between her brother and the drab realities of life, in order that his fancy might have untrammeled swing. Imagination, either on her own part or that of others, had never heretofore caused her any discomfort. She admitted its value, but the process by which it worked was beyond her. Now, however, she experienced a sudden distaste for her new surroundings. Derrick’s eyes had taken on an intense, far-pitched stare as though he were probing things beyond her own ken. He seemed to be moving away from her.

“I wonder if I’m going to 

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