I mention these facts concerning Fenwick for reasons that will appear later. He was leaving for San Francisco and the East the next week, by the way, and this was a scratch gathering of friends and acquaintances more or less to do Fenwick honor. Ben Allis and Mrs. Allis were giving the “party.” Nora Pate, Mrs. Allis’s niece, was spending with them an enforced holiday from school. She was at the dinner-table on sufferance merely. It was Nora, with her giggling flapperish reference to a ouija-board occurrence at school that had elicited Fenwick’s humorous quotation. Now you must also know that we were a fairly intimate but more than fairly eclectic group at the Allis’s table. Most of us were bred to one or another form of the Christian religion, went to church spasmodically (except Nora, who of course had to go every Sunday), and comfortably or uncomfortably, according to temperament, let the whole thing slide--took it for granted, or permitted it euthanasia, as it and our souls chose. But Mrs. Conway was a Catholic--“just the ordinary kind,” as she had once said herself, with a sidelong glance at Mrs. Medford, who was waveringly “High”; Allis was a scientific skeptic, and Fenwick a reverent free-thinker. Or so I had gathered. The typhoon had made him a free-thinker, and his inheritance and temperament had apparently kept him reverent. My personal convictions do not matter, but when it comes to ouija-boards, I am all with Allis. Young Nora had been rather stumped by Fenwick’s quotation. She had probably heard of Belshazzar, but she had never heard of Emily, and she certainly did not see what it had to do with the ouija-board revelations at midnight in Betty Dane’s room. After we had found out just where Fenwick had read Emily Dickinson, the talk swung back to the occult. Mrs. Medford’s pearl-powdered face and naturally red lips were eager. She even wanted the complete account of what had happened in Betty Dane’s room. Nora needed no more encouragement than that. “Why, Betty was desperate because she couldn’t be at home when her cousin had his leave; and she asked ouija if there wasn’t any chance of his leave being changed. And ouija said, ‘Measles will make you free,’ and of course we all laughed. Then we thought probably her cousin would have measles, so he couldn’t come, and Betty would be free of disappointment. And the next week Pauline Case came down with them--and Betty _is_ at home with her cousin, and she’s going to bring back a book that tells all about everything depending on the way the breath circulates in your body.” The flushed Nora, at a glance from her aunt, sank out of sight below the conversational tide. But Mrs. Medford had smiled comfortingly at her. “Prophesying is one thing they won’t usually engage to do, you know,” someone threw in. “I believe even Doyle and Lodge say that?” “Naturally--since they have to get it out of your subconscious.” This was Mrs. Conway.