I was chilled through, to tell the truth, and although I rarely drink anything I went back with him and took an ounce or two of villainous whiskey, poured out of a jug into a graduated glass. It is with deep humiliation of spirit I record that a housemaid coming into my library at seven o’clock the next morning, found me, in top hat and overcoat, asleep on the library couch.
I had, however, removed my collar and tie, and my watch, carefully wound, was on the smoking-stand beside me.
The death of Arthur Wells had taken place on Monday evening. Tuesday brought nothing new. The coroner was apparently satisfied, and on Wednesday the dead man’s body was cremated.
“Thus obliterating all evidence,” Sperry said, with what I felt was a note of relief.
But I think the situation was bothering him, and that he hoped to discount in advance the second sitting by Miss Jeremy, which Mrs. Dane had already arranged for the following Monday, for on Wednesday afternoon, following a conversation over the telephone, Sperry and I had a private sitting with Miss Jeremy in Sperry’s private office. I took my wife into our confidence and invited her to be present, but the unfortunate coldness following the housemaid’s discovery of me asleep in the library on the morning after the murder, was still noticeable and she refused.
The sitting, however, was totally without value. There was difficulty on the medium’s part in securing the trance condition, and she broke out once rather petulantly, with the remark that we were interfering with her in some way.
I noticed that Sperry had placed Arthur Wells’s stick unobtrusively on his table, but we secured only rambling and non-pertinent replies to our questions, and whether it was because I knew that outside it was broad day, or because the Wells matter did not come up at all I found a total lack of that sense of the unknown which made all the evening sittings so grisly.
I am sure she knew we had wanted something, and that she had failed to give it to us, for when she came out she was depressed and in a state of lowered vitality.
“I’m afraid I’m not helping you,” she said. “I’m a little tired, I think.”
She was tired. I felt suddenly very sorry for her. She was so pretty and so young—only twenty-six or thereabouts—to be in the grip of forces so relentless. Sperry sent her home in his car, and took to pacing the floor of his office.