“Bulger,” said Norcross, speaking in quick, staccato jerks, “if I told you what I’d seen and heard in the last fortnight, I couldn’t make you believe it.  Proofs!  Proofs!  I’ve wasted thirty years.  I might have had her—­the best part of her—­all this time.  You think I’m crazy—­” he stopped and peered into Bulger’s face.  “If anyone had talked this way to me six months ago, I’d have thought so myself.  Do you or don’t you?” he exploded.

“About as crazy as you ever were,” responded Bulger.  “Not to sugar coat the pill, people have always said you were crazy—­just before you let off your fireworks.  You’ve got there because you dared do things that only a candidate for Bloomingdale would attempt.  But you always landed, and we’ve another name for it now.”

“That’s it!” exclaimed Norcross.  “That’s exactly it.  I dare to say now that the dead do return!  People have believed in ghosts as long as they’ve believed in a Divine Providence—­just as many centuries and ages—­every race, every nation.  We hear in this generation that certain people have proved it—­found! the way—­set up the wires—­and we laugh, and call it all fraud.  I don’t laugh!  Why, we’re on the verge of things which make the railroad and the steamboat and the telegraph seem like toys—­if we only dared.  I dare—­I dare!” He went on pacing the floor; and now the beads had assembled into rivers, so that a tiny stream trickled down and fogged his reading-glasses.  He jerked them off, wiped them, wiped his face and forehead.  The action calmed him, brought him back to his reasonable grip on himself.  At the end of his route across the room, he sat down abruptly.

Bulger did not miss this shift of the new Norcross back toward the old, iron, inscrutable Norcross whom the world knew.  The next remark he directed against that aspect of his man.

“It’s all right,” said Bulger, “if you want to follow that line.”  During the short pause which ensued, he thought and felt intensely.  Working under the direction of a mind infinitely his superior for intrigue and subtlety, he had instruction to play gently upon the Norcross contrariety, the Norcross habit of rejecting advice.  This, if ever, seemed the time.  With a bold hand, he laid his counter upon the board.  “Just one thing to be careful about—­of course, it’s a mouse trying to steer a lion for me to advise you—­but watch those people, when they get on the subject of business.  Sometimes they work people, you know.”

Norcross’s face, fixed on the third monument from the south door of Old Trinity, permitted itself the luxury of a slight smile.

“I’m safe there,” he responded.  “Don’t think I haven’t tried her out—­put tests of my own.  I know what you’re thinking about—­Marsh and Diss Debar.  I tried at my very first seance to make her talk business and I’ve tried it twice since.  I couldn’t get a single rise out of that.  This medium receives from me her regular rate, and no more.  I established that in the beginning.  Though I suppose the guides could advise on business as well as on anything else.  But they think about other things on the other side than this”—­his hand swept over Lower Manhattan—­“this money grubbing.”