s going on,
the murderer and the murdered person are probably fearfully
excited--anger, fear, and so on. That means that their whole being is
stirred up right to the bottom, and that their hidden powers are
frightfully active. Well, the idea is that these hidden powers are
almost like acids, or gas--Hudson tells us all about that--and that
they can actually stamp themselves upon the room to such a degree that
when a sympathetic person comes in, years afterwards, perhaps, he sees
the whole thing just as it happened. It acts upon his mind first, of
course, and then outwards through the senses--just the reverse order
to that in which we generally see things.

"Well--that's only an illustration. Now my idea is this: How do we
know whether all the things that happened, from the pencil and the
rappings and the automatic writing, right up to the appearances Laurie
saw, were not just the result of these inner powers.... Look here.
When one person projects his thought to another it arrives generally
like a very faint phantom of the thing he's thinking about. If I'm
thinking of the ace of hearts, you see a white rectangle with a red
spot in the middle. See? Well, multiply all that a hundred times, and
one can just see how it might be possible that the thought of ... of
Mr. Vincent and Laurie together might produce a kind of unreal phantom
that could even be touched, perhaps.... Oh! I don't know."

Maggie paused. The girl at her side gave an encouraging murmur.

"Well--that's about all," said Maggie slowly.

"But you haven't--"

"Why, how stupid! Yes: the first theory.... Now that just shows how
unreal it is to me now. I'd forgotten it.

"Well, the first theory, my dear brethren, divides itself into two
heads--first the theory of the spiritualists, secondly the theory of
Mr. Cathcart. (He's a dear, Mabel, even though I don't believe one
word he says.)

"Well, the spiritualist theory seems to me simple R.-O.-T.--rot. Mr.
Vincent, Mrs. Stapleton, and the rest, really think that the souls of
people actually come back and do these things; that it was, really and
truly, poor dear Amy Nugent who led Laurie such a dance. I'm quite,
quite certain that that's not true whatever else is.... Yes, I'll come
to the coincidences presently. But how can it possibly be that Amy
should come back and do these things, and hurt Laurie so horribly?
Why, she couldn't if she tried. My dear, to be quite frank, she was a
very common little thing: a