“Now man!” I told him, “here is your chance. We have Tregarthen here, and we will help you all we can. You must fight him with the whole of your will-power. Defy him, raise him to anger, and at the crucial point I will do something which will destroy his power over you for ever! Now!” Carthew’s grip burnt into my wrists as he took hold of himself, and then all the bitter, dominant hatred that was in the man flamed out. He stood in the circle towering above us on our chairs and he poured into that trumpet a breadth of bilingual Spanish and English invective that would have led to murder anywhere. He paused for breath and from the trumpet came no chuckle, but a spluttering, stammering, furious attempt to reply. I had no need to prompt him to go on. He laced into his ghostly antagonist as if he had the earthly body there in front of him. All the pent-up hatred of the past months winged his words. The consciousness of his torment made his quarrel just, and at the height of his peroration I concentrated the whole of my psychic energies and made the four exorcism signs of the martinist ritual, bidding Tregarthen begone, never to return and never to be able to send a rap, and instantly broke the circle. I then roused the medium from the trance with a couple of simple passes. The reaction from the violence of the séance left us all spent and shaken. The medium recovered, remembering nothing, but feeling unusually exhausted. Later experiments with her showed that the domination by the Tregarthen control was purely temporary and that “Louis” and “Montecatini” had reasserted command. My own opinion is that nothing but the intense “hate concentration” of Carthew toward his ghostly antagonist could have enabled Tregarthen to assume control at all. It was a duel of wills between the living and the dead, fought over the narrow no-man’s land of the earth and spirit planes, and I am not sure that it was not a duel which ended fatally for the soul of Tregarthen. Carthew at any rate was free of all trouble afterwards, but wild horses could not drag him to a séance. Miller was more convinced by this astonishing séance than by far more material phenomena that he had seen. The following day, though, he sent me an explanation of the whole affair argued out on his own lines. He held that Carthew was the subject of an obsession and that the whole of the phenomena were due to subconscious hypnotism of the medium alternatively by me as a believer in Spiritualism and by Carthew. The direct voice he ascribed to unconscious or subconscious ventriloquism by the medium, and he pointed out that the words uttered by Tregarthen were precisely what one would expect Carthew to say if Carthew were in Tregarthen’s place. In other words, we were present at an amazing duel between Carthew’s conscious mind and an obsession of his subconscious mind that had built itself into a malignant identity.