Overwrought as I was, I was forced to bring my common sense to bear on the situation.  Here was a tragedy, a real and terrible one.  Suppose we had, in some queer fashion, touched its outer edges that night?  Then how was it that there had come, mixed up with so much that might be pertinent, such extraneous and grotesque things as Childe Harold, a hurt knee, and Mother Goose?

I remember moving impatiently, and trying to argue myself into my ordinary logical state of mind, but I know now that even then I was wondering whether Sperry had found a hole in the ceiling upstairs.

I wandered, I recall, into the realm of the clairvoyant and the clairaudient.  Under certain conditions, such as trance, I knew that some individuals claimed a power of vision that was supernormal, and I had at one time lunched at my club with a well-dressed gentleman in a pince nez who said the room was full of people I could not see, but who were perfectly distinct to him.  He claimed, and I certainly could not refute him, that he saw further into the violet of the spectrum than the rest of us, and seemed to consider it nothing unusual when an elderly woman, whose description sounded much like my great-grand-mother, came and stood behind my chair.

I recall that he said she was stroking my hair, and that following that I had a distinctly creepy sensation along my scalp.

Then there were those who claimed that in trance the spirit of the medium, giving place to a control, was free to roam whither it would, and, although I am not sure of this, that it wandered in the fourth dimension.  While I am very vague about the fourth dimension, I did know that in it doors and walls were not obstacles.  But as they would not be obstacles to a spirit, even in the world as we know it, that got me nowhere.

Suppose Sperry came down and said Arthur Wells had been shot above the ear, and that there was a second bullet hole in the ceiling?  Added to the key on the nail, a careless custom and surely not common, we would have conclusive proof that our medium had been correct.  There was another point, too.  Miss Jeremy had said, “Get the lather off his face.”

That brought me up with a turn.  Would a man stop shaving to kill himself?  If he did, why a revolver?  Why not the razor in his hand?

I knew from my law experience that suicide is either a desperate impulse or a cold-blooded and calculated finality.  A man who kills himself while dressing comes under the former classification, and will usually seize the first method at hand.  But there was something else, too.  Shaving is an automatic process.  It completes itself.  My wife has an irritated conviction that if the house caught fire while I was in the midst of the process, I would complete it and rinse the soap from my face before I caught up the fire-extinguisher.

Had he killed himself, or had Elinor killed him?  Was she the sort to sacrifice herself to a violent impulse?  Would she choose the hard way, when there was the easy one of the divorce court?  I thought not.  And the same was true of Ellingham.  Here were two people, both of them careful of appearance, if not of fact.  There was another possibility, too.  That he had learned something while he was dressing, had attacked or threatened her with a razor, and she had killed him in self-defence.