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AT dinner that night Willie Kennefick, who was staying in the house, began to tell his experiences in New York—he had just come from a little visit there. “The woman I took in to dinner,” said he, “gave me a solar plexus while I was busy with the oysters. She said to me, ‘I went to see such a wonderful man to-day. He told me the most astonishing things about my past and future, and he sold me a little wax image that I’m going to burn for my gout.’ ‘What!’ said I. ‘For my gout,’ said she. ‘I have to burn it slowly, and when it’s consumed my gout will be gone. I got itsocheap! Only twenty-five dollars.’”

“And what did you say, Willie?” asked Mrs. Thayer.

“I said ‘Cheap? It was a shame to cheat the poor devil in that fashion.’ And she said, ‘Wasn’t it a bargain? He wanted a hundred, but I brought him down.’”

“You must have been keeping queer company in New York,” said Henrietta Gillett.

“Not at all. It was at Mrs. Baudeleigh’s house, and the woman—well, her husband’s one of the biggest lawyers in New York. But, then, that’s no worse than the astrology some of us here have gone daft over.”

“Oh—astrology—that’s a different matter,” objected Mrs. Thayer. “You evidently haven’t looked into it. That is a science—not at all the same as palmistry and spiritualism, and those frauds.”

Cecilia smiled—the amused, pitying smile of wisdom in the presence of ludicrous ignorance—and looked at Frothingham. He returned her look—pleased to have a secret, and such an intimate secret, in common with her. “But don’t you think you’re a bit rash, Mrs. Thayer?” he drawled. “You certainly believe in ghosts, now, don’t you?”

Miss Gillett’s handsome, high-bred face expressed astonishment. “Doyou?” she asked, before Mrs. Thayer could answer him.

“We can’t doubt it over on our side. We’ve too much evidence of it. And—I was listening to an old chap from Cambridge—your Cambridge—very cleverold fellow,Ithought—Yarrow, wasn’t it? Yes, Yarrow.”

“Yarrow!” Miss Gillett’s eyes flashed scorn. “He’s a disgrace to New England. We pride ourselves on having the culture of Emerson and the other great men of our past. What would they think of us if they could look in on us with our Yarrows and our Gonga Sahds and our Mrs. Ramsays. All the sensible people in the country must be laughing at us. Pardon me, Lord Frothingham—I’m very indignant at what I regard as superstitions and impostors. It’s only my view.”

“Not at all, not at all,” said Frothingham with an uneasy glance at Cecilia’s angry face. “I’m not one of those who wish all to believe alike. What the devil should we do if we hadn’t each other’s opinions to laugh at?”

“You’re such an ardent disciple,” continued Miss Gillett, “you ought to go to Yarrow’s Mrs. Ramsay. She’ll put you in communication with spirits, as many as you like, or rather as many as you care to pay for. I think she gets ten a ghost—twenty for letters.”

The discussion was raging hotly round the table, all but two of the men, and all but four of the womenderiding astrology, palmistry, Buddhism, spiritualism; and the respective devotees of these cults deriding each the others. “Cut it out,” said Mrs. Ridgie finally. “We’ll have ‘rough house’ here the first thing you know.”

Everyone laughed. They liked slang, and Mrs. Ridgie’s was the boldest and quaintest. When the men and women were separated, “metaphysics” was again attempted by both. But the men who did not believe summarily laughed it down in the smoking room. “Those fads are all well enough for the women,” said Kennefick. “They’ve got to do something to pass the time, and they won’t do anything serious, or, if they do, they make a joke of it. But our men, Lord Frothingham”—he was addressing himself to the Earl, whose spiritualistic views he had not heard and did not suspect—“are too busy for such nonsense.”

“That’s a libel on the woman,” said Thayer—his fad was a militant socialism that had a kindly eye for a red flag. “It’s only women of the so-called fashionable class who go in for such silliness. The great mass of American women have something better to do.”

“That’s a libel on the women of the better class,”retorted Kennefick. “Precious few of them are so silly.”

“If it isn’t that it’s something else equally idle,” said Thayer. Except Frothingham he was the best dressed man in the room. “I’ve no time for idlers.”

“Why don’t you give your money away and shoulder a pick?” asked Kennefick teasingly.

“I’m not fit even to wield a pick”—Thayer was one of the ablest lawyers in Massachusetts—“and I’d give my money away if I could without doing more harm than good. There are two kinds of parasites—the plutocrats and the paupers. I’m ‘agin’ ’em both. And, as for spiritualism, I will admit that I don’t think we know enough about mind or the relations of mind and matter to dogmatise as you fellows have been doing.”

Kennefick winked at Frothingham as if saying: “Another proof that Thayer’s a crank.”

When Frothingham was beside Cecilia in the drawing room she said: “Would you like to go to Mrs. Ramsay?”

“Yes—will you take me?” he replied.

“I’ll write to-night making an appointment for Wednesday.”

He was liking her immensely now, and, while he believed—not nearly so vividly as at first—in her connections with the other world, he felt growing confidence that they would rapidly fade before reawakening interest in this world. Meanwhile, he reasoned, his cue was to ingratiate himself by sympathising with her and encouraging her to closer and closer confidence. “It’s only a step from best friend to lover,” he said to himself. And he made admirable use of the two days between her tentative acceptance of him and their visit to Mrs. Ramsay. He was justly proud of his manner toward her—a little of the brother, a great deal of the best friend, the tenderness and sympathy of the lover, yet nothing that could alarm her.

Mrs. Ramsay lived in an old brick cottage in a quiet street near Louisburg Square. In the two days Frothingham had become somewhat better acquainted with Henrietta Gillett and had got a strong respect for her intelligence. As he and Cecilia entered the dark little parlour he remembered what Henrietta had said about Mrs. Ramsay, and was on guard. The first impression he received was of a perfume, unmistakably of the heaviest, most suspicious Oriental kind. “Gad!” he said to himself, “that scent don’t suggestspirits. It smells tremendously of the world, the flesh, and the devil, especially the devil.”

As his eyes became accustomed to the faint light he discovered the radiating centre of this odour—a small blackish woman of forty or thereabouts, with keen shifty black eyes and a long face as hard and fleshless from the cheekbones down as from the cheekbones up. The mouth was wide and cold and cruel. She was dressed in a loose black woollen wrapper, tight at the wrists, and her scanty black hair was in a careless oily coil low on the back of her head. Her eyelids lifted languidly and she gave Cecilia her hand—a pretty hand, slender and sensitive.

“Good-morning, my dear,” she said. “This is the Earl of Frothingham, is it not?”

At this both Cecilia and Frothingham started—Cecilia because it was another and impressive evidence of Mrs. Ramsay’s power; Frothingham because he knew that voice so well. His knees weakened and he looked at Mrs. Ramsay again.

But she was not looking at him. She was saying to Cecilia: “Dr. Yarrow was here for two hours—he left not twenty minutes ago. I amsoexhausted!”

“Perhaps we would better come to-morrow,” saidCecilia, appeal, apology, and disappointment in her voice.

“No—no,” replied Mrs. Ramsay wearily. “Dr. Yarrow tells me he has never known me to be so thoroughly under control as to-day. And”—she smiled faintly at Cecilia—“you know I would do anything foryou.”

“Youhavedone everything for me,” said Cecilia, and her tone of humble, even deferential, gratitude filled Frothingham with pity and disgust. He was staring stolidly at Mrs. Ramsay, but if the room had been lighter his changed colour and white lips might have been noted. Cecilia seated herself, and Frothingham gladly sat also, where he could see Mrs. Ramsay’s face without her seeing him unless she turned her head uncomfortably.

She rang a small silver bell on the table at her elbow. A girl answered. “The light, please,” said Mrs. Ramsay.

The girl went away and returned in a moment with a lamp whose strong flame was completely and curiously shielded by a metal sphere except at one point underneath. When it was set upon the table it threw a powerful light in a flood upon a part of the surfaceof the table about six inches in diameter. The girl went to the windows and drew the heavy curtains across them. It was now impossible to see anything in the room except that small disc of intense light. In it presently appeared the slender, sensitive right hand of Mrs. Ramsay—it seemed to end at the wrist in nothingness. It laid upon the brightness a pad of white scribbling paper and a thick pencil with the heavy lead slightly rounded at the end; then it vanished. There was a long silence—Frothingham was sure he could hear Cecilia’s faint breathing. His own breath hardly came at all and his heart was beating crazily. He stared at those inanimate objects in the circle of dazzling light until his brain whirled.

A long sigh, apparently from Mrs. Ramsay, as if she were sinking into a deathlike sleep; a quick catching of the breath from the direction of Cecilia. He heard her move her chair to the light and then in it appeared her hand—long and narrow, looking waxen white, its nails, beautifully rounded, the most delicate blush of pink. It took the pencil and moved across the paper. Frothingham bent forward—she had written large, and he could easily read:

Dearest!

Her hand disappeared, and again there was in that unearthly light, only the pad, the pencil, and the heart-call into the infinite—“Dearest!”

A long pause, then the weird, severed hand—Frothingham could not associate it with Mrs. Ramsay—crawled haltingly into the light, hovered over the pencil, took it, began to make its blunt point scrawl along the paper—a loose, shaky handwriting. With the hair on the back of his head trembling to rise, Frothingham read:

My wife—I am glad you have come, though you bring another with you to profane our holy secret.

In the darkness a sharp exclamation from Cecilia, then a sound like a sob. The hand ceased to write, dropped the pencil, vanished instantly. In the light appeared Cecilia’s hand, trembling, its veins standing up, blue and pulsing—Frothingham was amazed that a hand by itself could express so much; it was as perfect a mirror of her feelings as her face would have been. She wrote eagerly:

But, dearest, you told me only this morning that he might, should, see all.

Her hand lifted the sheet, now filled with writing, laid it beside the pad, then disappeared. Again therewas a long silence, and again the mysterious hand crawled out of the darkness, loosely held the pencil, and wrote slowly, staggeringly, faintly:

No, I have not spoken to you, seen you, since he came into your life—It has been hard for me to push my way through to-day—There is a barrier between us—You have been deceived—Can it be that you—but no, I trust my wife—

The hand paused. “Oh! oh!” sobbed Cecilia. The hand was moving again:

My friends here tell me that you are going away across the sea with an English fortune-hunter—with him. You have been cruel enough to bring him here to our bridal chamber—Oh, Cecilia——

The end of the sheet had been reached, but the hand wrote on for a few seconds, making vague markings in space, then vanished, dropping the pencil with a noise that in the strained silence sounded like a crash and made both Cecilia and Frothingham leap in their chairs. After a moment Cecilia’s trembling, eager, pathetic hands lifted off the filled sheet and withdrew. But the hand did not return. After a long wait her right hand—it seemed bloodless now—appeared once more upon the paper and wrote:

I have been deceived. I love only you. I thought I was obeying you. Speak to me, dearest. You see into my heart. Speak to me. Do not leave me alone.

Her hand laid the sheet upon the other filled sheets and withdrew from that neutral ground of dazzling light between the two great mystery lands. Immediately the other hand darted into the light, caught the pencil, and scrawled in great, tottering letters:

Yes, yes—but I cannot until he has gone far from you—Then come again—Good-b——

The hand vanished and there was a moan from the darkness that enveloped the medium—a moan that ended in a suppressed shriek. Frothingham saw Cecilia’s hands hastily snatch the written sheets from under the light. Then he heard a voice in his ear—he hardly knew it as hers: “Come—come quickly!”

He rose, and with his hand touching her arm followed her. The door opened—the dim hallway seemed brightly lighted, so great was the contrast. The maid was seated there. She at once rose, entered the medium’s room, and closed the door behind her. Cecilia and Frothingham went into the quiet little street—the enormous sunshine, the white snow over everything, in the distance the rumble of the city. He gave a huge sigh of relief, and wiped the sweat from his face—his very hair was wet and his collar was wilted. He was sickly pale.

“Forgive me—it was all my fault—yet not mine—good-bye—”

“She always wishes to be left that way,” said Cecilia, as if she did not know what she was saying.

They walked to the corner together. “I am not well,” she said. He ventured to look at her; she was wan and old, and her eyes were deep circled in blue-black and she was blue-black at the corners of her mouth, at the edges of her nostrils. “I must go home—they will telephone Mrs. Ridgie. Don’t say where I was taken ill. Forgive me—it was all my fault—yet not mine—good-bye——” She did not put out her hand to him, but stood off from him with fear and anguish in her eyes.

“The woman’s a fraud—a——” he began.

She turned upon him with a fury of which he would not have believed her capable. “Go! go!” she exclaimed, as if she were driving away a dog. “Already you may have lost me my love. Go!”

He shrank from her. She walked rapidly away, and he saw her hail a cab, enter it, saw the cab drive away. With his head down he went in the opposite direction. “I think I must be mad,” he muttered. He thrust his hands deep into the outside pockets of his ulster. He drew out his right hand—in it was her purse, which she had given him to carry because it didnot fit comfortably into her muff. “No,” he said, “shewaswith me.”

He put the purse in the pocket and strode back the way he had come. He turned into the quiet little street, went to Mrs. Ramsay’s door, lifted and dropped the knocker several times. The maid opened the door a few inches and showed a frowning face.

Frothingham widened the space by thrusting himself into it. “Tell Mrs. Ramsay that Lord Frothingham wishes to speak to her,” he said in a tone that made her servant his servant.

She went into the ghost-chamber and soon reappeared. “Mrs. Ramsay is too exhausted to see anyone to-day.”

“Bah!” exclaimed Frothingham, and stalked past the maid and into the ghost-chamber.

The curtains were back and the slats of the shutters were open. Mrs. Ramsay, in her great chair by the table, was using a bottle of salts. She did not look in Frothingham’s direction as he closed the door sharply behind him.

He went to her and scowled down at her. “What the devil did you do that for, Lillian?”

Mrs. Ramsay did not change expression and did not answer.

“No one ever treated you decenter than I did.You——”

“No names, please, Slobsy,” said Mrs. Ramsay, shaking her bottle and sniffing it again.

At “Slobsy” he shivered—he was not a lunatic on the subject of his dignity, but he did not fancy this nickname of his Oxford days, thus inopportunely flung at him. He felt that at one stroke she had cut the ground from under his feet.

“I was sorry to do it,” she continued. “But I couldn’t have you poaching on my preserves, could I now, Slobsy? It cut me to do it”—she looked at him with friendly sympathy—“but you could better afford to lose her than I could. You forgive me, don’t you? You always were sensible.”

“I’ll expose you,” he said—he was once more imperturbable, and was looking at her calmly through his eyeglass and was speaking in his faintly satirical drawl.

“Expose—what?” asked Mrs. Ramsay, sniffing at her salts.

He reflected. Suppose he denounced her, put himselfin a position where he could, probably would, be forced to tell all he knew about her, roused her anger and her vindictiveness—whom would he expose? Clearly, no one but himself to Cecilia, or Cecilia to the public. He knew nothing about Mrs. Ramsay that would prove her a fraud—in fifteen years she might have become the properest person in the world, might have developed into a medium. He turned and left the room and the house. Halfway to the corner he paused; a faint, dreary smile drifted over his face.

“It’s really a new sensation—to settle a bill,” he said to himself. “An outlawed bill, too. What luck—just my rotten luck!”

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