"This is 'curiouser and curiouser,' as Alice in Wonderland used to say!" exclaimed Panton. "Do you think I could persuade Miss Bubbles to give an exhibition of her psychic gifts?" The speaker uttered the word "psychic" with a very satiric inflection in his pleasant voice. Varick smiled rather wryly. "You're quite likely to have an exhibition of them without asking for it! The first evening that my guests were here she held what I believe they call a séance, and as a result Miss Brabazon's uncle, old Burnaby, not only bolted from the room, but left Wyndfell Hall the next morning." "What an extraordinary thing!" "Yes," said Varick, "it _was_ an extraordinary thing. I confess I can't explain Bubbles' gift at all. At this séance of hers she described quite accurately long dead men and women--" "Are you sure of that, Varick?" "Of course I am, for she described my own mother." There was a pause. "Being a very intelligent, quick girl, she naturally helps herself out as best she can," went on Varick reflectively. "Then you're inclined to think her thought-reading is more or less a fraud?" cried Panton triumphantly. "Less, rather than more, for she's convinced me that she sees into the minds of her subjects and builds up a kind of--of--" "Description?" suggested the doctor. "More than that--I was going to say figure. She described, as if she saw them standing there before her, people of whom she'd never even heard--and the descriptions were absolutely exact. But if you don't mind, Panton--" He hesitated, and the other said, "Yes, Varick?" "Well, I'd rather you leave all that sort of thing alone, as far as Bubbles Dunster is concerned. Both Miss Farrow and I are very anxious that she shouldn't be up to any more of her tricks while she's here. People don't half like it, you see. Even _I_ didn't like it." Somehow it was a comfort to Varick to talk freely about Bubbles to a stranger--Bubbles had got on his nerves. He would have given a good deal to persuade her to leave Wyndfell Hall; but he didn't know how to set about it. In a sense she was the soul of the party. The others all liked her. Yet he, himself, felt a sort of growing repugnance to her which he would have been hard put to it to explain. Indeed, the only way he could explain it--and he had thought a good deal about it the last few days--was that she undoubtedly possessed an uncanny power of starting into life images which had lain long dormant in his brain. For one thing--but that, of course, might not be entirely Bubbles' fault--Milly, his poor wife, had become again terribly real to him. It was almost as if he felt her to be alive, say, in the next room--lying, as she had been wont to lie, listening for his footsteps, in the little watering place where they had spent the last few weeks of her life.