“I couldn’t say, ma’am. They was like chalk, now, and mighty hard to get off they was.”
“You remember just how they looked,—and where they were?”
“Oh, yes, ma’am.”
“Very well, then, that’s all. Don’t mention the matter to anybody, please.”
“No, ma’am, I won’t.”
Elsie went on down to the drawing room, and there found Mrs. Webb making the detective’s hair stand on end, as she detailed to him her experiences with spirits and her reasons for belief that her son had been taken away from his home by supernatural means.
Hanley listened, more with a horrified interest in her talk than with any belief in its bearing on the present case, and Elsie almost laughed outright as she heard Mrs. Webb solemnly avowing that she had seen, at séances, live people wafted through a solid wooden door.
“Oh, come, now,” she said, as she entered the room. “Dear Mrs. Webb, don’t ask us to believe such things!”
“Believe or not, as you choose,” said Mrs. Webb, haughtily; “your scepticism only exposes your ignorance. Why, innumerable such cases are on record; to students of spiritism the passing of matter through matter is one of the proved facts of psychical research.”
“And you think that Kim passed through that locked wooden door? Through the panels,—and left no trace of his passing?”