Sperry held up his hand.

“Absolutely not,” he said, gravely.  “She is coming in my car.  She doesn’t know to what house or whose.  She knows none of you.  She is a stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the neighborhood.”

II

The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane’s chair, as her companion did not dine with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors.  There Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been completely metamorphosed.

Mrs. Dane’s drawing-room is generally rather painful.  Kindly soul that she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there the many gifts of a long lifetime.  Photographs long outgrown, onyx tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and perilous matter.  We paused in the doorway, startled.

The room had been dismantled.  It opened before us, walls and chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken from the windows.  To emphasize the change, in the center stood a common pine table, surrounded by seven plain chairs.  All the lights were out save one, a corner bracket, which was screened with a red-paper shade.

She watched our faces with keen satisfaction.  “Such a time I had doing it!” she said.  “The servants, of course, think I have gone mad.  All except Clara.  I told her.  She’s a sensible girl.”

Herbert chuckled.

“Very neat,” he said, “although a chair or two for the spooks would have been no more than hospitable.  All right.  Now bring on your ghosts.”

My wife, however, looked slightly displeased.  “As a church-woman,” she said, “I really feel that it is positively impious to bring back the souls of the departed, before they are called from on High.”

“Oh, rats,” Herbert broke in rudely.  “They’ll not come.  Don’t worry.  And if you hear raps, don’t worry.  It will probably be the medium cracking the joint of her big toe.”

There was still a half hour until the medium’s arrival.  At Mrs. Dane’s direction we employed it in searching the room.  It was the ordinary rectangular drawing-room, occupying a corner of the house.  Two windows at the end faced on the street, with a patch of railed-in lawn beneath them.  A fire-place with a dying fire and flanked by two other windows, occupied the long side opposite the door into the hall.  These windows, opening on a garden, were closed by outside shutters, now bolted.  The third side was a blank wall, beyond which lay the library.  On the fourth side were the double doors into the hall.

As, although the results we obtained were far beyond any expectations, the purely physical phenomena were relatively insignificant, it is not necessary to go further into the detail of the room.  Robinson has done that, anyhow, for the Society of Psychical Research, a proceeding to which I was opposed, as will be understood by the close of the narrative.