Sperry had, I believe, told Herbert Robinson of what we had discovered, but nothing had been said to the women.  I knew through my wife that they were wildly curious, and the night of the second seance Mrs. Dane drew me aside and I saw that she suspected, without knowing, that we had been endeavoring to check up our revelations with the facts.

“I want you to promise me one thing,” she said.  “I’ll not bother you now.  But I’m an old woman, with not much more of life to be influenced by any disclosures.  When this thing is over, and you have come to a conclusion—­I’ll not put it that way:  you may not come to a conclusion—­but when it is over, I want you to tell me the whole story.  Will you?”

I promised that I would.

Miss Jeremy did not come to dinner.  She never ate before a seance.  And although we tried to keep the conversational ball floating airily, there was not the usual effervescence of the Neighborhood Club dinners.  One and all, we were waiting, we knew not for what.

I am sorry to record that there were no physical phenomena of any sort at this second seance.  The room was arranged as it had been at the first sitting, except that a table with a candle and a chair had been placed behind a screen for Mrs. Dane’s secretary.

There was one other change.  Sperry had brought the walking-stick he had taken from Arthur Wells’s room, and after the medium was in trance he placed it on the table before her.

The first questions were disappointing in results.  Asked about the stick, there was only silence.  When, however, Sperry went back to the sitting of the week before, and referred to questions and answers at that time, the medium seemed uneasy.  Her hand, held under mine, made an effort to free itself and, released, touched the cane.  She lifted it, and struck the table a hard blow with it.

“Do you know to whom that stick belongs?”

A silence.  Then:  “Yes.”

“Will you tell us what you know about it?”

“It is writing.”

“Writing?”

“It was writing, but the water washed it away.”

Then, instantly and with great rapidity, followed a wild torrent of words and incomplete sentences.  It is inarticulate, and the secretary made no record of it.  As I recall, however, it was about water, children, and the words “ten o’clock” repeated several times.

“Do you mean that something happened at ten o’clock?”

“No.  Certainly not.  No, indeed.  The water washed it away.  All of it.  Not a trace.”

“Where did all this happen?”

She named, without hesitation, a seaside resort about fifty miles from our city.  There was not one of us, I dare say, who did not know that the Wellses had spent the preceding summer there and that Charlie Ellingham had been there, also.

“Do you know that Arthur Wells is dead?”

“Yes.  He is dead.”