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as as if our friend had suddenly gone insane. I confess to a feeling of profound astonishment. I had never met Mrs. Harris before, but as she was an intimate friend of Mrs. Cameron, and quite evidently a woman of culture, I could not think her so practised a joker as to be "putting all this on." While still we sat in silence, another voice uttered a wail of infinite terror and despair. "I didn't do it! _Don't_ kill me! It was not _my_ work." And then, still more horrible to hear, a sound like the gurgling of blood came from the psychic's lips, mixed with babbled, frantic, incoherent words. I had a perfectly definite impression that she was impersonating some one with his throat cut. Her grimaces were disgusting and terrifying. The women shivered with horror. A few seconds later and her face changed; the hideous mask became white, expressing rigid, exalted terror. Her arms were drawn back as if tied at the elbow behind her back. Her head was uplifted, and in a low, monotonous, hushed voice she prayed: "Lord Jesus, receive--" A gasping, gurgling cry cut short her prayer, and, with tongue protruding from her mouth, she presented such a picture of a strangling woman that a sudden clear conception of what it all meant came to me. "She's impersonating a woman on the scaffold," I explained. "She has shown us a murder, and now she is depicting an execution. Is it Mrs. R., of Vermont?" I asked. She nodded slowly. "Save me!" she whispered. "Waken her, please. Don't let her do that any more," pleaded Mrs. Cameron, in poignant distress. Thereupon I called out, sharply: "That is enough! Wake! _Wake!_" In answer to my command she ceased to groan; her face smoothed out, and with a bewildered smile she opened her eyes. "What are you saying? Have I been asleep?" "You have, indeed," I replied, "and you've disclosed a deal of dubious family history. How do you feel?" "I feel very funny around my neck," she answered, wonderingly. "What have you been doing to me?" She rubbed her throat. "My neck feels as if it had a band round it, and my tongue seems swollen. What have you been about?" I held up a warning hand to the others. "You went off into a quiet little trance, that's all. I was mistaken. Either you are a psychic or you should have been an actress." As we stood thus confronting one another, Mrs. Cameron came between us, saying, "Do you know, Pauline came and talked with me--" At the word _Pauline_ the spell
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