old up your right hand and state by your honor as a member in good
standing that you have not primed her, Sperry."

Sperry held up his hand.

"Absolutely not," he said, gravely. "She is coming in my car. She
doesn't know to what house or whose. She knows none of you. She is a
stranger to the city, and she will not even recognize the neighborhood."

II

The butler wheeled out Mrs. Dane's chair, as her companion did not dine
with her on club nights, and led us to the drawing-room doors. There
Sperry threw them, open, and we saw that the room had been completely
metamorphosed.

Mrs. Dane's drawing-room is generally rather painful. Kindly soul that
she is, she has considered it necessary to preserve and exhibit there
the many gifts of a long lifetime. Photographs long outgrown, onyx
tables, a clutter of odd chairs and groups of discordant bric-a-brac
usually make the progress of her chair through it a precarious and
perilous matter. We paused in the doorway, startled.

The room had been dismantled. It opened before us, walls and
chimney-piece bare, rugs gone from the floor, even curtains taken from
the windows. To emphasize the change, in the center stood a common pine
table, surrounded by seven plain chairs. All the lights were out save
one, a corner bracket, which was screened with a red-paper shade.

She watched our faces with keen satisfaction. "Such a time I had doing
it!" she said. "The servants, of course, think I have gone mad. All
except Clara. I told her. She's a sensible girl."

Herbert chuckled.

"Very neat," he said, "although a chair or two for the spooks would have
been no more than hospitable. All right. Now bring on your ghosts."

My wife, however, looked slightly displeased. "As a church-woman," she
said, "I really feel that it is positively impious to bring back the
souls of the departed, before they are called from on High."

"Oh, rats," Herbert broke in rudely. "They'll not come. Don't worry. And
if you hear raps, don't worry. It will probably be the medium cracking
the joint of her big toe."

There was still a half hour until the medium's arrival. At Mrs. Dane's
direction we employed it in searching the room. It was the ordinary
rectangular drawing-room, occupying a corner of the house. Two windows
at the end faced on the street, with a patch of railed-in lawn beneath
them. A fire-place with a dying fire and flanked by two other windows,
occupied the long side opposite the door in