“I suppose you douse the glim.” Carter snapped off the light nearest to him. “That’s perfectly unnecessary,” Fenwick commented. “The man I know in Singapore does it any time--in broad daylight, between courses at tiffin, if he feels like it. All you do is to let your hand go slack, and think about something quite different.” Mrs. Conway, who had returned with her knitting, intervened. “I wouldn’t think too hard about something quite different, if I were you. That is, not if you want results.” “But we want to play fair,” Maud Allis protested. “There’s no sense in trying this kind of thing unless you do your best.” “I only meant,” Mrs. Conway explained, “that if you really want to let them in, you must make your mind as blank as possible. Don’t make an effort to think of anything. Just open the door and wait. You make me feel like an accessory before the fact”--she smiled a little--“except that I really don’t believe anything will happen.” She withdrew to a sofa and began to knit. “You just have to be quiet.” Fenwick gave his last explanations. “And let your right arm be comfortably slack, and don’t look at the paper if you do begin to write. And if nothing happens in twenty minutes”--he looked interrogatively at Maud Allis--“then we play bridge, do we?” Mrs. Allis nodded. “And I’m going to put out some of the lights, whether it’s necessary or not. We’d be rather ridiculous in a glare, and we’d probably all be looking at each other to see if anyone’s else arm was moving.” So she reduced the room to a demi-obscurity, very soothing and non-committal. Fenwick sat at the other end of Mrs. Conway’s sofa, resting his pad on his knee. “Won’t your knitting spoil it?” he murmured. “Dear no,” she whispered back. “I’ll stop, if you like. But knitting-needles won’t keep them away.” “No fooling, Ben.” Mrs. Allis’s admonishing words were the last spoken. After that, silence. I did my best to play the game, but my hand did not move. I became, somehow, perfectly sure that it never would move, and that conviction edged my voluntary slackness of spirit. The corners of the room were too dark for me to see how each fellow guest was faring; but I noted idly the little stir of Mrs. Conway’s needles, the faint fire-glow on Mrs. Medford’s bent blonde head, Ben Allis’s comfortably hunched position, Miss Ford’s graceful, pensive attitude. After fifteen minutes, I constituted myself timekeeper, moving my left hand so that the radium dial of my wrist-watch showed. I stared at it until I began to feel prickly all over. If my arm didn’t move then, I thought, I was surely no good at the business; for I was half hypnotized by my concentrated stare at the dial, and my left hand certainly had no physical knowledge of what my right hand, off in space, was doing.