This I had added with a certain bitterness born of failure, for if we could not move so insignificant an object, we might as well give up all idea of moving anything. But hardly were the words out of my mouth when there came from the abandoned table, a single peremptory rap, loud and rather startling. “What’s that?” I asked. “Only a rap,” said she. “I thought something would happen before long.” “And do you really think that is a spirit rapping?” I asked. “Oh dear no. I don’t think it has anything whatever to do with spirits.” “More perhaps with the very dry weather we have been having. Furniture often cracks like that in the summer.” Now this, in point of fact, was not quite the case. Neither in summer nor in winter have I heard ever furniture crack as the table had cracked, for the sound, whatever it was, did not at all resemble the husky creak of contracting wood. It was a loud sharp crack like the smart concussion of one hard object with another. “No, I don’t think it had much to do with dry weather either,” said she smiling. “I think, if you wish to know, that it was the direct result of our attempt to turn the table. Does that sound nonsense?” “At present, yes,” said I, “though I have no doubt that if you tried you could make it sound sense. There is, I notice, a certain plausibility about you and your theories----” “Now you are being merely personal,” she observed. “For the good motive, to goad you into explanations and enlargements. Please go on.” “Let us stroll outside, then,” said she, “and sit in the garden, if you are sure you prefer my plausibilities to bridge. It is deliciously warm, and----” “And the darkness will be more suitable for the propagation of psychical phenomena. As at séances,” said I. “Oh, there is nothing psychical about my plausibilities,” said she. “The phenomena I mean are purely physical, according to my theory.” So we wandered out into the transparent half light of multitudinous stars. The last crimson feather of sunset, which had hovered long in the West, had been blown away with the breath of the night wind, and the moon, which would presently rise, had not yet cut the dim horizon of the sea, which lay very quiet, breathing gently in its sleep with stir of whispering ripples. Across the dark velvet of the close-cropped lawn, which stretched seawards from the house, blew a little breeze full of the savour of salt and the freshness of night, with, every now and then, a hint so subtly conveyed as to be scarcely perceptible of its travel across the sleeping fragrance of drowsy garden-beds, over which the white moths hovered seeking their night-honey. The house itself, with its two battlemented towers of Elizabethan times, gleamed with many windows, and we passed out of sight of it, and into the shadow of a box-hedge, clipped into shapes and monstrous fantasies, and found chairs by the striped tent at the top of the sheltered bowling-alley.