out except the nursery governess. There were two small children.
There was a servants' ball somewhere, and, with the exception of the
butler, it was after two before they commenced to straggle in.
Except two plain-clothes men from the central office, a physician
who was with Elinor in her room, and the governess, there was no
one else in the house but the children, asleep in the nursery.

As I sat alone in the library, the house was perfectly silent. But
in some strange fashion it had apparently taken on the attributes
of the deed that had preceded the silence. It was sinister,
mysterious, dark. Its immediate effect on my imagination was
apprehension--almost terror. Murder or suicide, here among the
shadows a soul, an indestructible thing, had been recently
violently wrenched from its body. The body lay in the room overhead.
But what of the spirit? I shivered as I thought that it might even
then be watching me with formless eyes from some dark corner.

Overwrought as I was, I was forced to bring my common sense to bear
on the situation. Here was a tragedy, a real and terrible one.
Suppose we had, in some queer fashion, touched its outer edges that
night? Then how was it that there had come, mixed up with so much
that might be pertinent, such extraneous and grotesque things as
Childe Harold, a hurt knee, and Mother Goose?

I remember moving impatiently, and trying to argue myself into my
ordinary logical state of mind, but I know now that even then I
was wondering whether Sperry had found a hole in the ceiling
upstairs.

I wandered, I recall, into the realm of the clairvoyant and the