him the next time I called, a fat boy with his spiked mustache on
glazed cheeks, and a pocketful of rattling gold junk, a racing car on
the curb. He had had Ena out for a little spin, and they were discussing
how fast they had gone. Not better than sixty-eight, he protested
modestly.

"Albert hung on his every word; he was as servile to Esselmann as he was
arrogant to me. He said things I had either to overlook completely or
else slay him for. I tried to get his liking." McGeorge confessed to me
that, remembering what the Meekers' old servant had told him about
Albert's peculiar habit, he had even thought of making him a present of
a box of flies, precisely in the manner you would bring candy for a
pretty girl.

"It began to look hopeless," he confessed of his passion. "Ena admitted
that she liked me better than Wallace, but the family wouldn't hear of
it. Once, when Mr. Meeker came to the door, he shut it in my face. The
sittings kept going right along, and the manifestations were wonderful;
the connection between Jannie and Stepan, her spirit control, grew
closer and closer. There was a scientific investigation--some professors
put Jannie on a weighing-machine during a seance and found that, in a
levitation, she had an increase in weight virtually equal to the lifted
table. They got phonograph records of the rapping----"

"Did you hear them?" I interrupted.

"They are still in the laboratory," he asserted defiantly, "But I have a
photograph that was taken of an apparition." He fumbled in an inner
pocket and produced the latter. The print was dark and obscured, but
among the shadows a lighter shape was traceable: it might have been a
woman in loose, white drapery, a curtain, light-struck; anything, in
fact. I returned it to him impatiently.

"That," he informed me, "was a Christian martyr of ancient times."

"Burned to a cinder," I asked, "or dismembered by lions?"

"Can't you even for a minute throw off the illusion of the flesh?"

"Can you?"

He half rose in a flare of anger; for my question, in view of his
admissions, had been sharply pressed.

"All love is a sanctification," McGeorge said, recovering his temper
admirably. "The union of my beloved wife and me is a holy pact of
spirits, transcending corruption."

"You married her against considerable opposition," I reminded him.

"I had the hell of a time," he said in the healthy manner of the former
McGeorge. "Everything imaginable was done to finish m