to have her hands off the ouija-board to make the mental connection
that her mistress had feared.

All she said was, "Bats indeed! That shows it's spirits. There's
been a bat flying around this house all evening."

She got up from her chair tentatively, obviously hoping that the
seance was over.

"Oh, Miss Neily," she burst out. "Please let me sleep in your room
tonight! It's only when my jaw drops that I snore--I can tie it up
with a handkerchief!"

"I wish you'd tie it up with a handkerchief now," said her mistress
absent-mindedly, still pondering the message that the pointer had
spelled. "B--A--T--Bat!" she murmured. Thought-transference--
warning--accident? Whatever it was, it was--nerve-shaking. She
put the ouija-board aside. Accident or not, she was done with it
for the evening. But she could not so easily dispose of the Bat.
Sending a protesting Lizzie off for her reading glasses, Miss
Cornelia got the evening paper and settled down to what by now had
become her obsession. She had not far to search for a long black
streamer ran across the front page--"Bat Baffles Police Again."

She skimmed through the article with eerie fascination, reading
bits of it aloud for Lizzie's benefit.

"'Unique criminal--long baffled the police--record of his crimes
shows him to be endowed with an almost diabolical ingenuity--so
far there is no clue to his identity--'" Pleasant reading for