Herbert saw her to the car, and came back, looking grave.  We were standing together in the center of the dismantled room, with the lights going full now.

“Well,” he said, “it is one of two things.  Either we’ve been gloriously faked, or we’ve been let in on a very tidy little crime.”

It was Mrs. Dane’s custom to serve a Southern eggnog as a sort of stir-up-cup—­nightcap, she calls it—­on her evenings, and we found it waiting for us in the library.  In the warmth of its open fire, and the cheer of its lamps, even in the dignity and impassiveness of the butler, there was something sane and wholesome.  The women of the party reacted quickly, but I looked over to see Sperry at a corner desk, intently working over a small object in the palm of his hand.

He started when he heard me, then laughed and held out his hand.

“Library paste!” he said.  “It rolls into a soft, malleable ball.  It could quite easily be used to fill a small hole in plaster.  The paper would paste down over it, too.”

“Then you think?”

“I’m not thinking at all.  The thing she described may have taken place in Timbuctoo.  May have happened ten years ago.  May be the plot of some book she has read.”

“On the other hand,” I replied, “it is just possible that it was here, in this neighborhood, while we were sitting in that room.”

“Have you any idea of the time?”

“I know exactly.  It was half-past nine.”

III

At midnight, shortly after we reached home, Sperry called me on the phone.  “Be careful, Horace,” he said.  “Don’t let Mrs. Horace think anything has happened.  I want to see you at once.  Suppose you say I have a patient in a bad way, and a will to be drawn.”

I listened to sounds from upstairs.  I heard my wife go into her room and close the door.

“Tell me something about it,” I urged.

“Just this.  Arthur Wells killed himself tonight, shot himself in the head.  I want you to go there with me.”

“Arthur Wells!”

“Yes.  I say, Horace, did you happen to notice the time the seance began tonight?”

“It was five minutes after nine when my watch fell.”

“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?