ision.

Miss Jeremy, the medium, was due at 8:30 and at 8:20 my wife assisted
Mrs. Dane into one of the straight chairs at the table, and Sperry, sent
out by her, returned with a darkish bundle in his arms, and carrying a
light bamboo rod.

"Don't ask me what they are for," he said to Herbert's grin of
amusement. "Every workman has his tools."

Herbert examined the rod, but it was what it appeared to be, and nothing
else.

Some one had started the phonograph in the library, and it was playing
gloomily, "Shall we meet beyond the river?" At Sperry's request we
stopped talking and composed ourselves, and Herbert, I remember, took
a tablet of some sort, to our intense annoyance, and crunched it in his
teeth. Then Miss Jeremy came in.

She was not at all what we had expected. Twenty-six, I should say, and
in a black dinner dress. She seemed like a perfectly normal young
woman, even attractive in a fragile, delicate way. Not much personality,
perhaps; the very word "medium" precludes that. A "sensitive," I think
she called herself. We were presented to her, and but for the stripped
and bare room, it might have been any evening after any dinner, with
bridge waiting.

When she shook hands with me she looked at me keenly. "What a strange
day it has been!" she said. "I have been very nervous. I only hope I can
do what you want this evening."

"I am not at all sure what we do want, Miss Jeremy," I replied.

She smiled a quick smile that was not without humor. Somehow I had never
thought of a medium with a sense of humor. I liked her at once. We
all liked her, and Sperry, Sperry the bachelor, the iconoclast, the
antifeminist, was staring at her with curiously intent eyes.

Following her entrance Herbert had closed and bolted the drawing-room
doors, and as an added precaution he now drew Mrs. Dane's empty wheeled
chair across them.

"Anything that comes in," he boasted, "will come through the keyhole or
down the chimney."

And then, eying the fireplace, he deliberately took a picture from the
wall and set it on the fender.

Miss Jeremy gave the room only the most casual of glances.

"Where shall I sit?" she asked.

Mrs. Dane indicated her place, and she asked for a small stand to be
brought in and placed about two feet behind her chair, and two chairs
to flank it, and then to take the black cloth from the table and hang it
over the bamboo rod, which was laid across the backs of the chairs. Thus
arranged, the curta