or Askew--always to the hand--"it was an accident, was
it? How did it happen? Tell us exactly how it happened--exactly how it
happened. _We must know_.... How did the accident happen in Mrs. Hunt's
room to-night?"

Again the hand moved, more steadily this time, and seemingly in response
to his questions.

Doctor Askew glanced up at me with an encouraging smile. "We'll get it
now--all of it. Don't worry. The hand's responding to control."

Though sufficiently astonished and disturbed by this performance, I was
not, like Conlon, wholly at sea. Sober accounts of automatic writing
could be found in all modern psychologies; I had read some of these
accounts--given with all the dry detachment of clinical data. They had
interested me, not thrilled me. No supernatural power was involved. It
was merely the comparative rarity of such phenomena in the ordinary
normal course of experience that made them seem awe-inspiring. And yet,
the _hand_ there, solely animate, patiently writing in entire
independence of a consciously directing will----! My spine, too, like
Conlon's, registered an authentic shiver of protest and atavistic fear.
But, throughout, I kept my tautened wits about me, busily working; and
they drove me now on a sudden inspiration to the writing-table, where I
seized pen and paper and wrote down with the most collected celerity a
condensed account of--for so I phrased it--"what must, from the
established facts, be supposed to have taken place in Mrs. Hunt's
boudoir, just after Miss Blake had entered it." I put this account
deliberately as my theory of the matter, as the one solution of the
problem consistent with the given facts and the known characters
involved; and I had barely concluded when I was startled to my feet by
Doctor Askew's voice--raised cheerily above its monotonous murmur of
questions to the hand--calling my name.

"What are you up to, Mr. Hunt? My little experiment's over. It's a
complete success."

He was walking toward me with a handful of loose scribbled sheets from
the linen block.

"How is she now?" I inquired anxiously, as if she had just been
subjected to a dangerous operation.

"All right. Deep under. I shan't try to pull her out yet. Much better
for her to come out of it naturally herself. I suggest we darken the
room and leave her."

"That suits _me_!" I just caught from Conlon, over by the door.

"She'll be quite safe alone?"

"Absolutely. I want to read this thing to Conlon and