“Horace’s wife certainly bullies him,” said the voice.  “He’s afraid of her.  And the fire-tongs—­the fire-tongs—­the fire-tongs!”

“Whose cane is this?” Herbert repeated.

“Mr. Ellingham’s.”

This created a profound sensation.

“How do you know that?”

“He carried it at the seashore.  He wrote in the sand with it.”

“What did he write?”

“Ten o’clock.”

“He wrote ‘ten o’clock’ in the sand, and the waves came and washed it away?”

“Yes.”

“Horace,” said my wife, leaning forward, “why not ask her about that stock of mine?  If it is going down, I ought to sell, oughtn’t I?”

Herbert eyed her with some exasperation.

“We are here to make a serious investigation,” he said.  “If the members of the club will keep their attention on what we are doing, we may get somewhere.  Now,” to the medium, “the man is dead, and the revolver is beside him.  Did he kill himself?”

“No.  He attacked her when he found the letters.”

“And she shot him?”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Try very hard.  It is important.”

“I don’t know,” was the fretful reply.  “She may have.  She hated him.  I don’t know.  She says she did.”

“She says she killed him?”

But there was no reply to this, although Herbert repeated it several times.

Instead, the voice of the “control” began to recite a verse of poetry—­a cheap, sentimental bit of trash.  It was maddening, under the circumstances.

“Do you know where the letters are?”

“Hawkins has them.”

“They were not hidden in the curtain?” This was Sperry.

“No.  The police might have searched the room.”

“Where were these letters?”

There was no direct reply to this, but instead: 

“He found them when he was looking for his razorstrop.  They were in the top of a closet.  His revolver was there, too.  He went back and got it.  It was terrible.”

There was a profound silence, followed by a slight exclamation from Sperry as he leaped to his feet.  The screen at the end of the room, which cut off the light from Clara’s candle, was toppling.  The next instant it fell, and we saw Clara sprawled over her table, in a dead faint.

XI

In this, the final chapter of the record of these seances, I shall give, as briefly as possible, the events of the day following the third sitting.  I shall explain the mystery of Arthur Wells’s death, and I shall give the solution arrived at by the Neighborhood Club as to the strange communications from the medium, Miss Jeremy, now Sperry’s wife.

But there are some things I cannot explain.  Do our spirits live on, on this earth plane, now and then obedient to the wills of those yet living?  Is death, then, only a gateway into higher space, from which, through the open door of a “sensitive” mind, we may be brought back on occasion to commit the inadequate absurdities of the physical seance?