“I never saw it before,” said Mrs. Dane. “Perhaps it is Herbert’s.”
But I caught Sperry’s eye. We had both recognized it. It was Arthur Wells’s, the one which Sperry had taken from his room, and which, in turn, had been taken from Sperry’s library.
Sperry was watching me with a sort of cynical amusement.
“You’re an absent-minded beggar, Horace,” he said.
“You didn’t, by any chance, stop here on your way back from my place the other night, did you?”
“I did. But I didn’t bring that thing.”
“Look here, Horace,” he said, more gently, “you come in and see me some day soon. You’re not as fit as you ought to be.”
I confess to a sort of helpless indignation that was far from the composure the occasion required. But the others, I believe, were fully convinced that no human agency had operated to bring the stick into Mrs. Dane’s house, a belief that prepared them for anything that might occur.
A number of things occurred almost as soon as the lights were out, interrupting a train of thought in which I saw myself in the first stages of mental decay, and carrying about the streets not only fire-tongs and walking-sticks, but other portable property belonging to my friends.
Perhaps my excitement had a bad effect on the medium. She was uneasy and complained that the threads that bound her arms were tight. She was distinctly fretful. But after a time she settled down in her chair. Her figure, a deeper shadow in the semi-darkness of the room, seemed sagged—seemed, in some indefinable way, smaller. But there was none of the stertorous breathing that preceded trance.