whole thing was simple
imagination, or, rather, imagination acting upon a few little facts
and coincidences, and perhaps a little fraud too. Do you know the way,
if you're jealous or irritable, the way in which everything seems to
fit in? Every single word the person you're suspicious of utters all
fits in and corroborates your idea. It isn't mere imagination: you
have real facts, of a kind; but what's the matter is that you choose
to take the facts in one way and not another. You select and arrange
until the thing is perfectly convincing. And yet, you know, in nine
cases out of ten it's simply a lie...! Oh! I can't explain all the
things, certainly. I can't explain, for instance, the pencil
affair--when it stood up on end before Laurie's eyes; that is, if it
did really stand up at all. He says himself that the whole thing seems
rather dim now, as if he had seen it in a very vivid dream. (Have one
of these sugar things?)

"Then there are the appearances Laurie saw; and the extraordinary
effect they finally had upon him. Oh! yes; at the time, on the night
of Easter Eve, I mean, I was absolutely certain that the thing was
real, that he was actually obsessed, that the thing--the Personality,
I mean--came at me instead, and that somehow I won. Mr. Cathcart tells
me I'm right--Well; I'll come to that presently. But if it didn't
happen, I certainly can't explain what did; but there are a good many
things one can't explain; and yet one doesn't instantly rush to the
conclusion that they're done by the devil. People say that we know
very little indeed about the inner working of our own selves. There's
instinct, for instance. We know nothing about that except that it is
so. 'Inherited experience' is only rather a clumsy phrase--a piece of
paper gummed up to cover a crack in the wall.

"And that brings me to my third theory."

Maggie poured out for herself a second cup of tea.

"My third theory I'm rather vague about, altogether. And yet I see
quite well that it may be the true one. (Please don't interrupt till
I've quite done.)

"We've got in us certain powers that we don't understand at all. For
instance, there's thought-projection. There's not a shadow of doubt
that that is so. I can sit here and send you a message of what I'm
thinking about--oh! vaguely, of course. It's another form of what we
mean by Sympathy and Intuition. Well, you know, some people think that
haunted houses can be explained by this. When the murder i