"At first," McGeorge said, "if you remember, I was terrified at the thought of living forever; but I had got used to that truth, and the blessings of spiritualism dawned upon me. No one could ever separate Ena and me. The oldest India religions support that----" "With the exception," I was obliged to put in, "that all progression is toward nothingness, suspension, endless calm." "We have improved on that," he replied. "The joys that await us are genuine twenty-two carat--the eternal companionship of loving ones, soft music, summer----" "Indestructible lips under a perpetual moon." He solemnly raised a hand. "They are all about you," he said; "they hear you; take care. What happened to me will be a warning." "Materialize the faintest spirit," I told him, "produce the lightest knock on that Fyfe table, and I'll give you a thousand dollars for the cause." He expressed a contemptuous superiority to such bribery. "By your own account," I reminded him, "the Meekers gave this Esselmann every advantage. Why?" McGeorge's face grew somber. "I saw him the next time I called, a fat boy with his spiked mustache on glazed cheeks, and a pocketful of rattling gold junk, a racing car on the curb. He had had Ena out for a little spin, and they were discussing how fast they had gone. Not better than sixty-eight, he protested modestly. "Albert hung on his every word; he was as servile to Esselmann as he was arrogant to me. He said things I had either to overlook completely or else slay him for. I tried to get his liking." McGeorge confessed to me that, remembering what the Meekers' old servant had told him about Albert's peculiar habit, he had even thought of making him a present of a box of flies, precisely in the manner you would bring candy for a pretty girl. "It began to look hopeless," he confessed of his passion. "Ena admitted that she liked me better than Wallace, but the family wouldn't hear of it. Once, when Mr. Meeker came to the door, he shut it in my face. The sittings kept going right along, and the manifestations were wonderful; the connection between Jannie and Stepan, her spirit control, grew closer and closer. There was a scientific investigation--some professors put Jannie on a weighing-machine during a seance and found that, in a levitation, she had an increase in weight virtually equal to the lifted table. They got phonograph records of the rapping----" "Did you hear them?" I interrupted. "They are still in the laboratory," he asserted defiantly, "But I have a photograph that was taken of an apparition." He fumbled in an inner pocket and produced the latter. The print was dark and obscured, but among the shadows a lighter shape was traceable: it might have been a woman in loose, white drapery, a curtain, light-struck; anything, in fact. I returned it to him impatiently. "That," he informed me, "was a Christian martyr of ancient times." "Burned to a cinder," I asked, "or dismembered by lions?"