"Quite right. Well, don't worry. Hold out a little longer. This is a ghastly sort of pantomime for you, but there's always a grand transformation scene at the end. Who knows how soon the curtain will rise on fairyland and the happy lovers and all that bright and sparkling business? Children demand it--must have it.... And you are very young yet." He laughed, seeing her perplexed expression. "You don't know what I mean, do you? Listen, Shiela; stay here to dinner, if you can stand my relatives. We won't play cards. You'll really find it amusing I think." "Do you wish me to stay?" "Yes, I do. I want you to see something." A few moments afterward she took her umbrella and waterproof and went away to dress, returning to a dinner-table remarkable for the silence of the diners. Something, too, had gone wrong with the electric plant, and after dinner candles were lighted in the living-room. Outside it rained heavily. Malcourt sat beside his wife, smoking, and, unaided, sustaining what conversation there was; and after a while he rose, dragged a heavy, solid wooden table to the middle of the room, placed five chairs around it, and smilingly invited Shiela, the Tressilvains, and Portlaw to join him. "A seance in table-tipping?" asked his sister coldly. "Really, Louis, I think we are rather past such things." "I never saw a bally table tip," observed Tressilvain. "How do you do it, Louis?" "I don't; it tips. Come, Shiela, if you don't mind. Come on, Billy." Tressilvain seated himself and glanced furtively about him. "I dare say you're all in this game," he said, with a rattling laugh. "It's no game. If the table tips it tips, and our combined weight can't hold it down," said Malcourt. "If it won't tip it won't, and I'll bet you a hundred dollars that you can't tip it, Herby." Tressilvain, pressing his hands hard on the polished edge, tried to move the table; then he stood up and tried. It was too heavy and solid, and he could do nothing except by actually lifting it or by seizing it in both hands and dragging it about. One by one, reluctantly, the others took seats around the table and, as instructed by Malcourt, rested the points of their fingers on the dully polished surface. "Does it really ever move?" asked Shiela of Malcourt. "It sometimes does." "What's the explanation?" demanded Portlaw, incredulously; "spirits?" "I don't think anybody here would credit such an explanation," said Malcourt. "The table moves or it doesn't. If it does you'll see it. I'll leave the explanation to you, William." "Have you ever seen it move?" asked Shiela, turning again to Malcourt. "Yes; so has my sister. It's not a trick." Lady Tressilvain looked bored, but answered Shiela's inquiry: "I've seen it often. Louis and I and my father used to do it. I don't know how it's done, and nobody else does. Personally I think it's rather a stupid way to spend an evening--"