did not expect it she inclined her head sympathetically and added :
"You came to hear of the house through Bella Foxley, and you say that she had recommended houses to you before?"
"Well, yes. She had rather a flair, Tom used to say. She found Hazy for us. You know—that house where two men of the Plague Year walk about and say, "Bring out your dead." Of course, they never did say it while we were there, and so Tom couldn't put much about it in the article he wrote. We only stayed a month, but it was a very interesting old house, and we had a good deal of success with planchette there. Although, I might tell you, I don't really like planchette. It makes me think— it almost makes me believe——"
"Did your husband ask a fee for admission to his séances?"
"Why, how else could we have lived?" asked Cousin Muriel. "He certainly did not get very much for his writing."
"Then—if you don't object to the question—did he never encounter people who were disappointed when the séance, we will say, produced no results?"
"The séances always produced results," responded Muriel. "If it wasn't one thing it would be another. That was what was so wonderful, and rather frightening, really. Tom never had what you might call a barren séance."
"Really?" said Mrs. Bradley, noting down this extraordinary fact.
"Oh, no," said Muriel eagerly. "I don't know whether you've attended many séances, but Tom could induce the spirits. He had the most wonderful powers."
"Oh? So your husband was a medium?"
"No. I was. But I could only work through him. He always said he got wonderful results with me. They used to scare me sometimes, all the same. I mean, you can go too far ... that's what people say."
"Tell me," said Mrs. Bradley after a pause, "did Miss Foxley have mediumistic powers?"
"Bella? Oh, dear no! She was terribly materialistic. She used to sit with us——"
"Always?" asked Mrs. Bradley sharply.
"Well, if she was staying in the house. Not otherwise, of course. Although Tom did say once that when I was in a trance Bella came and spoke. Oh, only her astral body or something, of course. I'm afraid I don't remember all the terms. But, at any rate, she projected herself, it seems——"
"By means of the road or the railway," was Mrs. Bradley's mental note upon this——"
"And appeared. Tom said it was very interesting, and that he telegraphed to the Institution next day to know whether Bella was very ill or even dead. Of course she wasn't either the one or the other, bur they did say, funnily enough, that she'd fallen off her bicycle in the grounds as she was making a quick dash into the village that morning for some shopping that hadn't turned up. She was in a fearful state, and complained about her ankle, although she wouldn't have the doctor to it."
"Strange that a figment of that kind could travel all that way," said Mrs. Bradley.
"Oh, it wasn't all that way," Muriel put in brightly. "It was only about twelve miles as the crow flies, which is the way such things would travel I suppose."
"I don't know" said Mrs. Bradley soberly. "Wouldn't they perhaps be earth-bound to the roads?"
"Even if they were," said Muriel, who seemed oblivious of the purport of these suggestions, "they would only have had to come about seventeen miles, I believe."
"Ah?" said Mrs. Bradley. "And now, about this particular haunted house in which we are interested."
"Oh, nobody appeared there. It was simply a poltergeist," replied her victim.
"In what way?"
"Raps, footsteps, raucous laughter, writing on the walls, bell-ringing, throwing things about, moving objects from one place to another, cold air, lights in windows—that sort of thing."
"How many of the things you have just mentioned took place in the haunted house?" asked Mrs. Bradley, who, in flying hieroglyphics, had taken down the entire list. "Raps?"
"Oh, yes, ever so many times."
"Footsteps?"
"Both light and heavy. Sometimes it sounded like somebody in great boots, sometimes more like stockinged feet. Sometimes they ran, and sometimes they walked, and once they just scuffled about over our heads as though two people were fighting."
"You said raucous laughter. Can you substantiate that?"
"I don't know what you mean, but it sounded more like costermongers.''
"Writing on the walls?"
"Oh, yes. But I cleaned it all off. It wasn't—it wasn't very nice."
"Are the spirits in the habit of being obscene?"
"No, that's the funny part. They're not.* I mean, they usually write things you can't make any sense out of. I've