“Like Mrs. Conway, I’m not open-minded. I disbelieve it too utterly. I’m prejudiced. But I don’t doubt my knowledge acted telepathically on your more sensitive--what shall I say?--mental mechanism. It’s all suggestion. Mrs. Medford involuntarily suggests Jack Hilles to you, and I involuntarily suggest the kind of person I knew him to be.” We were silent for a moment. “It’s hideous, all the same,” I said finally. “He’s dead, after all--in the Argonne.” “But not fighting for his country,” Allis remarked quietly. “He was shot--for other reasons. I’ve no particular business to know that for a fact, but I do. Fanny Medford never knew the worst of Jack Hilles, but she had no illusions about him until he went into the war. Then he became a hero. When he was ‘killed in the Argonne’--which is all _she_ knows about it--he was _a fortiori_ a hero; a super-hero, if you like. You may have noticed that Fanny isn’t exactly impersonal in her attitude to life.” He went on, after a pause. “I hope no one saw anything in my expression.... I was rather shaken by the glimpse I got. I never thought even Jack Hilles went so far as that. I wonder if Fanny saw. She accused me of believing it all. She must have meant she thought I believed it on the score of Fenwick’s automatic writing. I believed it on the score of knowing that Hilles was capable of anything. And that, I perhaps didn’t conceal sufficiently--and all of it--I’m banking heavily on Mrs. Conway to explain.” “I still don’t see why I had to write the miserable stuff,” argued Fenwick--though he seemed a little more at ease than he had been. “Well, I can’t tell you that,” Allis replied. “I’m inclined to believe that Mrs. Conway is wrong about people’s not being, more or less, ‘psychic.’ Certainly, even she would have to admit that some are more sensitive, readier vehicles than others. It looks to me as though you were a corker, Fenwick!” Fenwick brooded for a time in silence, while Allis and I smoked. At last he spoke. “No, it’s too queer. Evil spirits would explain everything, but I haven’t gone back to the Middle Ages yet. You try to explain it, Allis, by arranging an intricate system of mental telephone wires--installed in an instant, ready for the emergency. That may be accurate, but it’s extremely complicated. Too complicated, I’d say. I’m not contradicting you, you understand. But for myself, I usually take the line of least resistance.” He rose and faced us. His fingers twitched a little as he, in turn, lighted a cigarette. “Meaning--?” Allis queried. “Meaning that if Jack Hilles was the kind of person you say he was, the easiest place for that sort of screed to have come from is--Jack Hilles.” Allis’s lips folded themselves firmly. “If you choose to admit the supernatural hypothesis, I suppose it _is_ easy. I was ruling out impossibilities.”