“‘You meant,’ ‘you said,’ ‘you did,’” he cried. “What if it’s ‘he meant,’ ‘he said,’ ‘he did’?”
“It’s impossible,” she said.
“Good Lord! What’s impossible?” he asked. “What if I really am that which I have so long pretended to be? What if I am a medium, one who is the mysterious bridge between the quick and the dead? I’m frightened, but I’m bound to say I’m horribly interested. All that you tell me I said when I was in trance never came out of Mrs. Forsyth’s mind. It wasn’t there. She didn’t know about the pearl pin; she had never known it. Nor had I ever known it. Where did it come from, then? Only one person knew, the boy who died ten years ago.”
“It yet remains to be seen whether it is true,” said she. “We shall know in an hour or two, for she is motoring straight down to her house in the country.”
“And if it turns out to be true, who was talking?” said he.
The sunset faded into the dusk of the clear May evening, and the two still sat there waiting for the telephone to inform them whether the door which, as Waghorn had said, had seemed so often ajar, and never quite closed, was now thrown open, and light and intelligence from another world had shone on his unconscious mind. Presently the tinkling summons came, and with an eager curiosity, below which lurked that fear of the unknown, the dim, mysterious land into which all human creatures pass across the closed frontier, he went to hear what news awaited him.
“Trunk call,” said the operator, and he listened.
Soon the voice came through.
“Mr. Waghorn?” it said.
“Yes.”