"Well, that's as you look at it. When I realized what was going on I wanted to leave, and, I repeat, had the chief actress been an old hag or the usual sloven who plays this game, I would have fled; but she was as beautiful as a statue as she lay there, professedly in deep trance." "You're sure it was Viola?" "I wish there were a doubt! Yes, she was there, surrounded by a group of Pratt's friends, giving a _performance_." This word, too, expressed his contempt, his pain. "She went the whole length--lent herself to the cheapest kind of jugglery, playing with horrible adroitness upon the emotions of a lot of bereaved men and women. It was revolting, Kate. It shakes one's faith in humanity to see such a girl in such a position--and that nice-appearing old mother sat there serene as a tabby-cat while her daughter bamboozled a dozen open-faced ninnies." "Tell me exactly what happened; I can't share your horror till I know what the girl actually did." He approached the details with a grimace. "First of all, imagine a little half-circle of well-dressed men and women, in a big drawing-room, enclosing a girl lying on a low chair under a single gas-jet, and a man standing beside her speechifying." "That was Clarke, of course." "Of course. Then imagine the light turned down, and the usual floating guitar--in the dark, of course--and rappings and whispers and the touch of hands--all in the dark. Then imagine--this will make you laugh--some kind of horn or megaphone of tin, that rambled around invisibly, distributing voices of loved ones here and there like sweetmeats out of a cornucopia--" "You mean the spirits _spoke_ through that thing?" "That's what they all believed." "But you don't think the girl--" "Who else? Some of the voices were women's and one or two were children's. Clarke couldn't do the children's voices." "I can't believe it of her! Clarke must have done them. He's capable of anything, but I don't, I won't believe such baseness of that girl." "It hurts me to admit it, Kate, but I am forced to believe that she not only sang through that horn to-night, but that she lied to me. She told me once that she had no voice, and yet 'by request' she sang into that horn, and very sweetly, too, the very song to which she played an accompaniment when Clarke and I met for the first time. The effrontery of it was confounding." "Maybe there was a confederate." "That doesn't sweeten the mess very much." "No, and yet it wouldn't be quite so bad. But go on--what else?" "Then I was invited by the 'controls'--so Clarke said--to come up and sit beside the medium, which I did, very loathly. It gave me a keen pang to look down on that lovely creature pretending to sleep, knowing perfectly well that she was planning some deep deception." "You _are_ bitter. What next?" "I took a seat beside her, determined to see if she really had a hand in the deception. I thought I could prevent anything happening." "Did you?"