"You see, it’s still sealed," she announced, then, shutting her eyes, she continued: "My guides tell me that he’s what you might call infatuated, but he’ll come back to you and say he’s sorry. Do you understand that?" The woman was now painfully embarrassed and shrank into her seat. The medium, however, did not spare her. It was too good a chance for a dramatic sensation. She tore the envelope open and read its contents boldly: "Does he care more for Mae Phillips than he does for me?" It was a psychological moment. The old women stared at Mrs. Brindon with morbid delight. There was a little buzzing of whispers through the room. Then the audience prepared itself for the next sensation. The medium picked up another envelope. "This is marked ’275,’" she said, then she clutched her throat. "Oh," she cried, "I’m strangling! They’s somebody here who passed out very sudden, like they was poisoned. It’s terrible. I can’t answer the question the party has written because there’s an evil influence here, a wicked woman. She had three husbands and two of ’em died suspicious. Her name is Riley. Would that be you?" She pointed forcefully at a dried-up, old woman in a shawl, with bleared eyes and a veined nose. There was no response. "Was this question something about your daughter?" Madam Spoll asked. The woman coughed and bowed, shrinking into herself. "I guess you better go somewhere else for your readings," Madam Spoll declared cruelly. "Your aura don’t seem to me to be very harmonious. I don’t know what’s the matter to-night," she went on, passing her hand across her forehead in apparent distress. "The conditions around me are something horrid." Her voice rose. "There’s somebody in this very room here who has committed murder. I can’t do a thing until I get that off my mind. My guides tell me who it is, and that they’ll be satisfied if he’ll acknowledge it and say he’s sorry. Otherwise, this séance can’t go on." She stopped and glared about the hall. By this time she had worked her audience up to an intense excitement. Every one looked at his neighbor, wondering what was to come, but no one offered to confess to a crime. Madam Spoll raged up and down the platform in a frenzy. Then she stopped like an elephant at bay. "I know who this person is. It’s a man, and if he don’t rise and acknowledge it, I shall point him out!" No one stirred. On the fourth seat, a clean-shaven man of thirty-five, with sharp, aquiline features and wide-spread ears, sat, transfixed with horror, his two hands clenched. It was Mr. Perry, the cleverest actor in the medium’s support. She advanced toward him as if drawn by a secret power, stared into his eyes, and putting her hand upon his shoulder, said: "Thou art the man!"