When twenty minutes were up, no one stirred. I decided to give them a little more time, for good measure. The minute-hand crawled as it does when you are taking a pulse or a temperature. Before the half hour was quite reached, Ben Allis leaped to his feet. “I’m tired of this. There’s nothing in it. Switch on the lights, you people.” But the others were stretching cramped limbs, rising slowly from their fixed positions, tottering in the half-gloom. I had not risen, myself, and I watched them. They looked drugged, unsure, wan and ungraceful in the dim light--purgatorial poor souls. Only for a second; but just for a second the only normal thing in the scene was the implacable motion of Mrs. Conway’s fingers. Then Carter turned on the light at my elbow, and I saw my own pad of paper. The page, ten inches by eight, was covered with the huge scrawl of two words: “Ask Fenwick.” And I had not known, staring at the dial of my watch, that my arm had moved. The other lights went on, then. People held their sheets of paper up before them like shields, and moved to the nearest lamp. All except Fenwick, who still held to his corner of the sofa. “Nothing--of course.” Mrs. Medford spoke first, then flung her pad down on the table. “Nothing here.” Ben Allis grinned over his. “Mine says something!” Maud Allis cried, as she bent over it under a lamp. “But I can hardly read it, it’s so queer.” Miss Ford and Carter pressed towards her. “Oh, I see now,” she said. “It’s ‘Ask Fenwick.’” I bit my lip and delayed my contribution to knowledge. But while Carter and Genevieve Ford were examining the unsoiled whiteness of their sheets of paper, I looked at Fenwick. He sat in his corner, open-eyed now but tired, surrounded by white things. Mrs. Conway had stopped knitting and was looking at him with concentrated interest. Her hand fluttered over the sheets of paper that lay between them on the sofa, but never once quite touched them. The group at the table turned to me. “Did you get anything?” they chorused. Their backs were all more or less turned to Fenwick and Mrs. Conway, you understand. I came forward. “Just like Maud’s. ‘Ask Fenwick.’ Pick up your manuscript, Fenwick,” I called, “and let us see it.” They all turned, then. “Why, he’s written _heaps_!” Mrs. Medford rushed to the sofa, but Mrs. Conway’s lifted hand fended her off from the papers. “Give him time,” she murmured; “he doesn’t realize yet what he’s done.” Mrs. Medford stopped, but Carter was not so easily dealt with. He strode over and began picking up the sheets of paper. Fenwick yawned. “Can I have a cigarette? By gum! I think I must have pulled something off, my arm is so tired.” He flexed it as he rose. “You did, my boy, you did! Well, who says we aren’t psychic?” This was Carter, arranging the sheets in the order in which presumably they had fallen from Fenwick’s busy hand.