She had, however, left the lantern behind to illuminate the machine, and it now slanted past and flickered on the toe of that foot. He tried to remove his eyes from it, but the thing held him with a morbid fascination. Look where he would, it stuck in the end of his eye and held him in an anguish. He kept his hand ready to the lever, and succeeded in obeying the woman’s orders to stop, go ahead, or back, but he acted as one hypnotised. In about half an hour a dim light off the bow warned them off Lombard Street pier, and from here they crawled slowly past the water-front, guided by the lights on the sea-wall and the lanterns of ships in the stream. Below the Pacific Mail dock their run was straight for Mission Rock, and from there to the Potrero flats, but they were continually getting off their course and regaining it, beating about this way and that, confused in direction by the lights in the fog. During this time the two exchanged hardly a word that did not have to do with the navigation of the boat. Vango watched her, silhouetted against the mist as she bent to one side and the other, and the distressing tensity of the situation did not prevent him now from racking his wits to find some possible explanation of her identity and purpose. He was a keen observer and used to making shrewd guesses, but this was too much for him. At last, in the gray of the dawn, the launch arrived off Hunter’s Point, and the medium’s eyes were straining through the murk to see some landing pier, when he received a sudden summons to stop the boat. He obeyed and looked up at the woman, who came aft. He flattened himself against the rail in terror of her, for, sure now that one murder had been done aboard the launch, he feared another. “Now,” said the quadroon woman, “I want to know who you are and all about you.” In a few stuttering syllables he told her his story, persisting with a childish fatuity in the deceit he had already begun, and welding to it bits of truth from the strange procession of events that had carried him through the past few months. When he mentioned the fact that he was a medium, he noticed a change in the woman’s attitude immediately. His cunning awoke, and the sharper began to assert himself, following this clew, telling of how many persons he had aided with his wonderful clairvoyant powers, and the success of his trances. It is needless to say that he did not mention Mrs. Higgins, nor his reason for having given up his practice. As he rolled off the glib catch-words and phrases of his trade, he watched the woman sharply through his drooping eyelids with the agile scrutiny of a professional trickster, and sought in her appearance some clew to her secret.