, the women were for going on. The men were more doubtful,
and Herbert voiced what I think we all felt.

"We're getting in pretty deep," he said. "We have no right to step in
where the law has stepped out--no legal right, that is. As to moral
right, it depends on what we are holding these sittings for. If we
are making what we started out to make, an investigation into psychic
matters, then we can go on. But with this proviso, I think: Whatever may
come of it, the result is of psychic interest only. We are not trailing
a criminal."

"Crime is the affair of every decent-minded citizen," his sister put in
concisely.

But the general view was that Herbert was right. I am not defending our
course. I am recording it. It is, I admit, open to argument.

Having decided on what to do, or not to do, we broke into animated
discussion. The letter to A 31 was the rock on which all our theories
foundered, that and the message the governess had sent to Charlie
Ellingham not to come to the Wells house that night. By no stretch of
rather excited imaginations could we imagine Ellingham writing such a
letter. Who had written the letter, then, and for whom was it meant?

As to the telephone message, it seemed to preclude the possibility of
Ellingham's having gone to the house that night. But the fact remained
that a man, as yet unidentified, was undoubtedly concerned in the case,
had written the letter, and had probably been in the Wells house the
night I went there alone.

In the end, we decided to hold one more seance, and then, unless the
further developments were such that we must go on, to let the affair
drop.

It is typical of the strained nervous tension which had developed in
all of us during the past twelve days, that that night when, having
forgotten to let the dog in, my wife and I were roused from a sound
sleep by his howling, she would not allow me to go down and admit him.

VIII

On Sunday I went to church. I felt, after the strange phenomena in Mrs.
Dane's drawing-room, and after the contact with tragedy to which they
had led, that I must hold with a sort of desperation to the traditions
and beliefs by which I had hitherto regulated my conduct. And the
church did me good. Between the immortality it taught and the theory of
spiritualism as we had seen it in action there was a great gulf, and
I concluded that this gulf was the soul. The conclusion that mind and
certain properties of mind survived was not eno