“Indeed. Will you tell me how I may be of service to you?”
She looked at me, and I developed a most unnecessary feeling. I rose once more, this time firmly resolved to take my leave, but again the doctor detained me.
“Miss Van Loan,” he said, “allow me to present Mr. Evans, my friend and colleague. Like me, he is an investigator of the supernormal in psychic phenomena.”
Her acknowledgment of the introduction was accompanied by a charming smile that immediately put me at my ease.
“I have heard of your work in connection with that of Dr. Dorp,” she said. “How fortunate that I find you two together—especially as my reason for coming to see the doctor has a direct bearing on the very subject that seems to be of interest to both of you. Won’t you stay?”
I relapsed once more into my chair.
The doctor, I observed, had pricked up his ears like a hound on a hot trail. He leaned forward in his chair and pressed the tips of his fingers together—an attitude he always assumed when absorbed in a problem that was of intense interest to him.
“Miss Van Loan,” he began, “you are not by any chance a relative of my old friend and fellow worker, Gordon Van Loan?”
“I am his niece.”
“Indeed. I begin to understand your interest in spiritistic phenomena. Dense of me not to have thought of it before.”