ham."

"I came professionally," he said. He paused. The manner of Norcross, on
all first meetings, was timid and hesitating. It was one of his
unconscious tricks. Because of that timidity, new-comers, in trying to
put him at his ease revealed themselves to his shrewd observation. But
there was a real embarrassment at this meeting. He was approaching the
subject which had lain close to his imagination ever since three days
ago, when Bulger said carelessly that a woman had given him the address
of the best spook medium in the business.

"I want to know," he said, "all about--myself."

She laughed lightly as she seated herself in an old-fashioned
straight-back chair.

"If I should tell you that," she said, "I would give you the sum and
substance of human wisdom. That seems to me the greatest mystery of the
unknowable. No human being ever thoroughly understood any other human
being, I suppose,--and yet no human being knows himself. If you search
yourself, you find mystery. If you ask others, you find double mystery.
Perhaps that is the knowledge which is reserved for the Divine."

"That is true," responded Norcross. "That is true. But your spirits--"

"Not mine," she interrupted. "And perhaps not spirits, either. Though
they speak to me, I cannot say that they are real, any more than I can
tell that this table, these clothes"--her long, expressive, ringless
hand swept across the area of her skirt--"than you yourself, are real.
All reality and unreality may dwell in the mind. Though personally,"
she added, "I prefer to believe that this chair, these clothes, you, I,
are real. And if they are real, so are the Voices. At least, so I
believe."

This philosophy was past any power of Norcross for repartee; the
faculties which deal with such things had wasted in him during thirty
years in Wall Street. But the effect of her voice, her ladyhood, and
her command of this philosophy--those moved him.

"Will your voices tell me anything?" he asked, irrelevantly, yet coming
straight to the point.

"Impatience," she answered, "will not help you. The power bloweth where
it listeth. That impatience is one of the roads to trickery employed by
the frauds of--my profession."

A smile lifted the mustache of Norcross.

"You admit that there _are_ frauds in your profession, then?"

"Oh, dear, yes!" she smiled back at him. "It lends itself so easily to
fraud that the temptation among the little people must be
overwhelming--the more