Certainly the afternoon was spoilt for the rest of us, and I remarked upon this to a very pleasant, smart-looking young American lady when the sitting was over and we had retired to the reception-room to find wraps and galoshes, etc.
"Oh yes; wasn't he just exasperating?" she said, with ready sympathy.
She looked much too young and smart and good-looking for the ordinary type of "investigator," and I could not refrain from asking how she had come into this galère.
She explained her position readily, and it was very interesting to me.
She was a young married lady, and had first been brought to the house, six months before, by a cousin of hers who was staying with them in New York, and thought the experience might be amusing.
"We just came in for a joke," she said; "but something happened which interested me so much that I have come again several times, and until to-day have always had an interesting time."
Then she told me about her first sitting.
I had noticed upon her ungloved hand a very beautiful scarabæus, set in fine gold, and evidently by an artist in the craft. "Yes, it is a Tiffany setting," she observed, seeing my eyes drawn to it. She took off the ring, and gave it into my hands.
"That ring is really the cause of my being here to-day," she continued. "The scarabæus was given to me some years ago by Professor——" (she gave the name of a well-known American Egyptologist). "He made a great pet of me when I was a child, and I begged it from him. When I was going to be married last year he insisted upon having it set for me by Tiffany as a wedding present, and he then told me there was no doubt at all about its being a genuine antique. He had come across it many years before by a curious chance when travelling in Egypt, and had been assured that it was a genuine Cleopatra relic. 'I can't answer for that,' he said, laughing, 'but it is certainly many centuries old. I have no doubt it is genuine so far as age goes.' Well, the night my cousin and I came here together I did not take off my gloves until after we had gone in to the séance room, so no one could have seen my ring—and you know Mrs Gray's sittings always begin in the dark? I took my gloves off when I found we had to sit in a circle holding hands, and one of the first materialisations was announced to be that of Cleopatra." (I had seen "Cleopatra" more than once in 1886, in the same house—E. K. B.) "She rushed across the room in the complete darkness, seized my right hand, amongst all the hands in a circle of twenty people or more, almost tore this special ring from my finger, and said in a tone of indescribable grief and longing: 'Mine! Mine! Ah, Chem! Chem!'"
This was sufficiently startling, even apart from the mention of Chem, as the ancient name for Egypt, in a milieu of this kind!