[Illustration: ROSALIE LE GRANGE] THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY AN EPISODE IN THE CAREER OF ROSALIE LE GRANGE, CLAIRVOYANT By WILL IRWIN Illustrated by Frederick C. Yohn 1910 CONTENTS I. The Unknown Girl II. Mr. Norcross Wastes Time III. The Light IV. His First Call V. The Light Wavers VI. Enter Rosalie Le Grange VII. Rosalie's First Report VIII. The Fish Nibbles XI. Rosalie's Second Report X. The Streams Converge XI. Through the Wall-Paper XII. Annette Lies XIII. Annette Tells the Truth XIV. Mainly from the Papers LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS Rosalie le Grange Annette "It wasn't the money; it was the game--" He had taken an impression of mental power as startling as a sudden blow in the face "Then it's as good as done" Norcross's breath came a little faster "I was looking straight down on the back parlors" "Stay where you are," he commanded THE HOUSE OF MYSTERY I THE UNKNOWN GIRL In a Boston and Albany parlor-car, east bound through the Berkshires, sat a young man respectfully, but intently studying a young woman. Now and then, from the newspapers heaped in mannish confusion about his chair, he selected another sheet. Always, he took advantage of this opportunity to face the chair across the aisle and to sweep a glance over a piquant little profile, intent on a sober-looking book. Again, he would gaze out of the window; and he gazed oftenest when a freight train hid the beauties of outside nature. The dun sides of freight cars make out of a window a passable mirror. Twice, in those dim and confused glimpses, he caught just a flicker of her eye across her book, as though, she, on her part, were studying him. It was her back hair which had first entangled Dr. Blake's thoughts; it was the graceful nape of her neck which had served to hold them fast. When the hair and the neck below dawned on him, he identified her as that blonde girl whom he had noted at the train gate, waving farewell to some receding friend--and noted with approval. As a traveler on many seas and much land, he knew the lonely longing to address the woman in the next seat. He knew also, as all seasoned travelers in America know, that such desire is sometimes gratified, and without any surrender of decency, in the frank and easy West--but never east of Chicago. This girl, however, exercised somehow, a special pull upon his attention and his imagination. And he found himself playing a game by which he had mitigated many a journey of old. He divided his personality into two parts--man and physician--and tried, by each separate power, to find as much as he could from surface indications about this travel-mate of his.