ing to the bulging curtain of the
cabinet. Imagine his surprise when he saw that she had simply freed
her foot from the shoe, which I was carefully holding down, and with a
backward movement of the leg was reaching out into the cabinet behind
her chair and was doing the rapping with her toes.

Lying on the floor he had grasped her foot and caught her heel with a
firm hand. She had responded with a wild yell that showed she knew she
was trapped. Her secret was out.

Hysterically Mrs. Popper began to upbraid the inspector as he rose to
his feet, but Farrington quickly interposed.

"Something was working against us to-night, gentlemen. Yet you demanded
results. And when the spirits will not come, what is she to do? She
forgets herself in her trance; she produces, herself, the things that
you all could see supernaturally if you were in sympathy."

The mere sound of Farrington's voice seemed to rouse in me all the
animosity of my nature. I felt that a man who could trump up an excuse
like that when a person was caught with the goods was capable of almost
anything.

"Enough of this fake seance," exclaimed Craig. "I have let it go
on merely for the purpose of opening the eyes of a certain deluded
gentleman in this room. Now, if you will all be seated I shall have
something to say that will finally establish whether Mary Vandam was the
victim of accident, suicide, or murder."

With hearts beating rapidly we sat in silence.

Craig took the beakers and test-tubes from the shelf behind the curtain
and placed them on the little deal table that had been so merrily
dancing about the room.

"The increasing frequency with which tales of murder by poison appear
in the newspapers," he began formally, "is proof of how rapidly this new
civilisation of ours is taking on the aspects of the older civilisations
across the seas. Human life is cheap in this country; but the ways
in which human life has been taken among us have usually been direct,
simple, aboveboard, in keeping with our democratic and pioneer
traditions. The pistol and the bowie-knife for the individual, the rope
and the torch for the mob, have been the usual instruments of sudden
death. But when we begin to use poisons most artfully compounded
in order to hasten an expected bequest and remove obstacles in its
way--well, we are practising an art that calls up all the memories of
sixteenth century Italy.

"In this beaker," he continued, "I have some of the contents of