as as if our
friend had suddenly gone insane.

I confess to a feeling of profound astonishment. I had never met Mrs.
Harris before, but as she was an intimate friend of Mrs. Cameron, and
quite evidently a woman of culture, I could not think her so practised a
joker as to be "putting all this on."

While still we sat in silence, another voice uttered a wail of infinite
terror and despair. "I didn't do it! _Don't_ kill me! It was not _my_
work." And then, still more horrible to hear, a sound like the gurgling
of blood came from the psychic's lips, mixed with babbled, frantic,
incoherent words. I had a perfectly definite impression that she was
impersonating some one with his throat cut. Her grimaces were disgusting
and terrifying. The women shivered with horror. A few seconds later and
her face changed; the hideous mask became white, expressing rigid,
exalted terror. Her arms were drawn back as if tied at the elbow behind
her back. Her head was uplifted, and in a low, monotonous, hushed voice
she prayed: "Lord Jesus, receive--"

A gasping, gurgling cry cut short her prayer, and, with tongue
protruding from her mouth, she presented such a picture of a strangling
woman that a sudden clear conception of what it all meant came to me.
"She's impersonating a woman on the scaffold," I explained. "She has
shown us a murder, and now she is depicting an execution. Is it Mrs. R.,
of Vermont?" I asked.

She nodded slowly. "Save me!" she whispered.

"Waken her, please. Don't let her do that any more," pleaded Mrs.
Cameron, in poignant distress.

Thereupon I called out, sharply: "That is enough! Wake! _Wake!_"

In answer to my command she ceased to groan; her face smoothed out, and
with a bewildered smile she opened her eyes. "What are you saying? Have
I been asleep?"

"You have, indeed," I replied, "and you've disclosed a deal of dubious
family history. How do you feel?"

"I feel very funny around my neck," she answered, wonderingly. "What
have you been doing to me?" She rubbed her throat. "My neck feels as if
it had a band round it, and my tongue seems swollen. What have you been
about?"

I held up a warning hand to the others. "You went off into a quiet
little trance, that's all. I was mistaken. Either you are a psychic or
you should have been an actress."

As we stood thus confronting one another, Mrs. Cameron came between us,
saying, "Do you know, Pauline came and talked with me--"

At the word _Pauline_ the spell