“Would a slight noise disturb her?” Mrs. Dane asked.

Miss Jeremy thought not, if the circle remained unbroken, and Mrs. Dane considered.

“Bring me my stick from the hall, Horace,” she said.  “And tell Clara I’ll rap on the floor with it when I want her.”

I found a stick in the rack outside and brought it in.  The lights were still on in the chandelier overhead, and as I gave the stick to Mrs. Dane I heard Sperry speaking sharply behind me.

“Where did you get that stick?” he demanded.

“In the hall.  I—­”

“I never saw it before,” said Mrs. Dane.  “Perhaps it is Herbert’s.”

But I caught Sperry’s eye.  We had both recognized it.  It was Arthur Wells’s, the one which Sperry had taken from his room, and which, in turn, had been taken from Sperry’s library.

Sperry was watching me with a sort of cynical amusement.

“You’re an absent-minded beggar, Horace,” he said.

“You didn’t, by any chance, stop here on your way back from my place the other night, did you?”

“I did.  But I didn’t bring that thing.”

“Look here, Horace,” he said, more gently, “you come in and see me some day soon.  You’re not as fit as you ought to be.”

I confess to a sort of helpless indignation that was far from the composure the occasion required.  But the others, I believe, were fully convinced that no human agency had operated to bring the stick into Mrs. Dane’s house, a belief that prepared them for anything that might occur.

A number of things occurred almost as soon as the lights were out, interrupting a train of thought in which I saw myself in the first stages of mental decay, and carrying about the streets not only fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging to my friends.

Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium.  She was uneasy and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight.  She was distinctly fretful.  But after a time she settled down in her chair.  Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed sagged—­seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller.  But there was none of the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.

Then, suddenly, a bell that Sperry had placed on the stand beyond the black curtain commenced to ring.  It rang at first gently, then violently.  It made a hideous clamor.  I had a curious sense that it was ringing up in the air, near the top of the curtain.  It was a relief to have it thrown to the ground, its racket silenced.

Quite without warning, immediately after, my chair twisted under me.  “I am being turned around,” I said, in a low tone.  “It as if something has taken hold of the back of the chair, and is twisting it.  It has stopped now.”  I had been turned fully a quarter round.

For five minutes, by the luminous dial of my watch on the table before me, nothing further occurred, except that the black curtain appeared to swell, as in a wind.