"The machinery of the imposture stood confessed in this investigation. The bookcase was a dummy piece of furniture which concealed a door of communication between the front and back rooms. Door of room, and door of bookcase, the front of which opened in one piece, were both so artfully padded with baize as to open and shut noiselessly; and it was by this means that the tricksters had been able to bring their innocent accomplice into the room unobserved, or to go in and out themselves while the sceptical among their audience might be watching the only obvious entrance to the room. In the kitchen below the iron rod and the hole through the ceiling plainly indicated the means by which the girl had been lifted off her feet. The transverse bar was attached to the rod in the room above, by the noiseless hands of the professor. "All this I heard afterwards from Gerald, who took an active part in the investigation. For myself, while the inquisitive explorers were tramping in and out of the rooms above and below, I remained beside the two good people who were caring for the helpless sharer in the foolish show--accomplice or victim, as the case might be. "I had found and relighted the lamp, and by its light Mrs. Ravenshaw and I examined the girl's forehead, which had been severely cut in her fall. While we were gently drying the blood which stained her eyelids and cheeks, she opened her eyes and looked at us with a bewildered expression. "'Oh, how my head aches!' she moaned. 'What was it hurt me like that?' "'You were hurt in your fall,' I answered. 'Your head struck the edge of the table.' "'But how could I fall? How could they let me fall?' "'The strap round your waist broke, and you fell from the iron bar.' "She looked at me in amazement--simulated, as I thought--and it distressed me to think that fair young face should be capable of such a lying look. "'What strap? The spirits were holding me up--wafting me towards the sky.' "'Very likely,' I answered, picking up the broken strap and showing it to her; 'but the spirits couldn't manage it without a little mechanical aid. And the mechanical aid was not as sound as it ought to have been.' "The girl took the strap in her hands, and looked at it and felt it with an expression of countenance so full of hopeless bewilderment that I began to doubt my previous conviction, to doubt even the evidence of my senses. Could any youthful face be so trained to depict unreal emotion? Could so childlike a creature be such a consummate actress? "'Was this round my waist?' she asked, looking from me to the kind-hearted woman whose arms were still supporting her slender, undeveloped figure.