ad been commendably
penetrating, asked about Mrs. Meeker's sister; but he discovered nothing
more than that--Lizzie Tuoey allowed for a heretic--she was religious.
They were all serious about the spiritism, and believed absolutely in
Jannie and Stepan, in the messages, the voices and shades that they
evoked.

However, questioned directly about Mrs. Kraemer's presence at a sitting,
the servant's ready flow of comment and explanation abruptly dwindled to
the meager invocation of holy names. It was evidently a business with
which she wanted little dealing, even with Mrs. Kraemer safely absent,
and with no suspicion of criminal irregularity.

The reporting of that occurrence gave a sufficiently clear impression of
the dead woman. She was the relict of August, a naturalized American
citizen born in Salzburg, and whose estate, a comfortable aggregate of
more than two millions, came partly from hop-fields in his native
locality. There was one child, a son past twenty, not the usual inept
offspring of late-acquired wealth, but a vigorously administrative youth
who spent half the year in charge of the family investment in Germany.
At the beginning of the Great War the inevitable overtook the Salzburg
industry; its financial resources were acquired by the Imperial
Government, and young Kraemer, then abroad, was urged into the German
Army.

McGeorge, with a great deal of trouble, extracted some additional angles
of insight on Mrs. Kraemer from the reluctant Lizzie.

She was an impressive figure of a lady in fine lavender muslin ruffles,
a small hat, blazing diamonds, and a hook in her nose, but Roman and not
Jew. A bullying voice and a respectful chauffeur in a glittering car
completed the picture. She had nothing favorable to say for the location
of the Meeker house; indeed, she complained pretty generally, in her
loud, assertive tones, about the inefficiency of city administration in
America, but she held out hopes of improvement in the near future. She
grew impatiently mysterious--hints were not her habit--in regard to the
good shortly to enfold the entire earth. Lizzie gathered somehow that
this was bound up with her son, now an officer in a smart Uhlan
regiment.

A man of Mrs. Kraemer's type, and the analogy is far closer than common,
would never have come to the Meekers for a message from a son warring in
the north of France. It is by such lapses that women with the greatest
show of logic prove the persistent dominatio