“I do hope, Adele, that we shall make you believe.  But we shall.  Oh, I am confident we shall.”  And her voice was feverish.

Adele dropped for the moment her tone of raillery.

“I am not unwilling to believe,” she said, “but I cannot.  I am interested—­yes.  You see how much I have studied the subject.  But I cannot believe.  I have heard stories of how these manifestations are produced—­stories which make me laugh.  I cannot help it.  The tricks are so easy.  A young girl wearing a black frock which does not rustle—­it is always a black frock, is it not, because a black frock cannot be seen in the dark?—­carrying a scarf or veil, with which she can make any sort of headdress if only she is a little clever, and shod in a pair of felt-soled slippers, is shut up in a cabinet or placed behind a screen, and the lights are turned down or out—­” Adele broke off with a comic shrug of the shoulders.  “Bah!  It ought not to deceive a child.”

Celia sat with a face which would grow red.  She did not look, but none the less she was aware that Mme. Dauvray was gazing at her with a perplexed frown and some return of her suspicion showing in her eyes.  Adele Tace was not content to leave the subject there.

“Perhaps,” she said, with a smile, “Mlle. Celie dresses in that way for a seance?”

“Madame shall see tonight,” Celia stammered, and Camille Dauvray rather sternly repeated her words.

“Yes, Adele shall see tonight.  I myself will decide what you shall wear, Celie.”

Adele Tace casually suggested the kind of dress which she would prefer.

“Something light in colour with a train, something which will hiss and whisper if mademoiselle moves about the room—­yes, and I think one of mademoiselle’s big hats,” she said.  “We will have mademoiselle as modern as possible, so that, when the great ladies of the past appear in the coiffure of their day, we may be sure it is not Mlle. Celie who represents them.”

“I will speak to Helene,” said Mme. Dauvray, and Adele Tace was content.

There was a particular new dress of which she knew, and it was very desirable that Mlle. Celie should wear it tonight.  For one thing, if Celia wore it, it would help the theory that she had put it on because she expected that night a lover; for another, with that dress there went a pair of satin slippers which had just come home from a shoemaker at Aix, and which would leave upon soft mould precisely the same imprints as the grey suede shoes which the girl was wearing now.

Celia was not greatly disconcerted by Mme. Rossignol’s precautions.  She would have to be a little more careful, and Mme. de Montespan would be a little longer in responding to the call of Mme. Dauvray than most of the other dead ladies of the past had been.  But that was all.  She was, however, really troubled in another way.  All through dinner, at every word of the conversation, she had felt her reluctance towards this seance swelling into a positive disgust.  More than once she had felt driven by some uncontrollable power to rise up at the table and cry out to Adele: