"Then it would have been about half past when the trance began?"

"Yes."

There was a silence at Sperry's end of the wire. Then:

"He was shot about 9:30," he said, and rang off.

I am not ashamed to confess that my hands shook as I hung up the
receiver. A brick house, she had said; the Wells house was brick. And so
were all the other houses on the street. Vines in the back? Well, even
my own house had vines. It was absurd; it was pure coincidence; it
was--well, I felt it was queer.

Nevertheless, as I stood there, I wondered for the first time in a
highly material existence, whether there might not be, after all, a
spirit-world surrounding us, cognizant of all that we did, touching but
intangible, sentient but tuned above our common senses?

I stood by the prosaic telephone instrument and looked into the darkened
recesses of the passage. It seemed to my disordered nerves that back of
the coats and wraps that hung on the rack, beyond the heavy curtains,
in every corner, there lurked vague and shadowy forms, invisible when I
stared, but advancing a trifle from their obscurity when, by turning my
head and looking ahead, they impinged on the extreme right or left of my
field of vision.

I was shocked by the news, but not greatly grieved. The Wellses had been
among us but not of us, as I have said. They had come, like gay young
comets, into our orderly constellation, trailing behind them their cars
and servants, their children and governesses and rather riotous friends,
and had flashed on us in a sort of bright impermanence.

Of the two, I myself had preferred Arthur. His faults were on the
surface. He drank hard, gambled, and could not always pay his gambling
debts. But underneath it all there had always been something boyishly
honest about him. He had played, it is true, through most of the thirty
years that now marked his whole life, but he could have been made a man
by the right woman. And he had married the wrong one.

Of Elinor Wells I have only my wife's verdict, and I have found that, as
is the way with many good women, her judgments of her own sex are rather
merciless. A tall, handsome girl, very dark, my wife has characterized
her as cold, calculating and ambitious. She has said frequently, too,
that Elinor Wells was a disappointed woman, that her marriage, while
giving her social identity, had disappointed her in a monetary way.
Whether that is true or not, there was no doubt, by the time they had
li