Just because some chain of conjecture was beginning to form itself in my mind, I made no allusion to this odd adventure, and after dinner Margaret, amid protests from Hugh, got out the planchette which had persisted in writing “gardener.” My surmise was, of course, utterly fantastic, but I wanted to convey no suggestion of any sort to Margaret.... For a long time the pencil skated over her paper making loops and curves and peaks like a temperature chart, and she had begun to yawn and weary over her experiment before any coherent word emerged. And then, in the oddest way, her head nodded forward and she seemed to have fallen asleep. Hugh looked up from his book and spoke in a whisper to me. “She fell asleep the other night over it,” he said. Margaret’s eyes were closed, and she breathed the long, quiet breaths of slumber, and then her hand began to move with a curious firmness. Right across the big sheet of paper went a level line of writing, and at the end her hand stopped with a jerk, and she woke. She looked at the paper. “Hullo,” she said. “Ah, one of you has been playing a trick on me!” We assured her that this was not so, and she read what she had written. “Gardener, gardener,” it ran. “I am the gardener. I want to come in. I can’t find her here.” “O Lord, that gardener again!” said Hugh. Looking up from the paper, I saw Margaret’s eyes fixed on mine, and even before she spoke I knew what her thought was. “Did you come home by the empty cottage?” she asked. “Yes: why?” “Still empty?” she said in a low voice. “Or--or anything else?” I did not want to tell her just what I had seen--or what, at any rate, I thought I had seen. If there was going to be anything odd, anything worth observation, it was far better that our respective impressions should not fortify each other. “I tapped again, and there was no answer,” I said. Presently there was a move to bed: Margaret initiated it, and after she had gone upstairs Hugh and I went to the front door to interrogate the weather. Once more the moon shone in a clear sky, and we strolled out along the flagged path that fronted the house. Suddenly Hugh turned quickly and pointed to the angle of the house. “Who on earth is that?” he said. “Look! There! He has gone round the corner.” I had but the glimpse of a tallish man of heavy build. “Didn’t you see him?” asked Hugh. “I’ll just go round the house, and find him; I don’t want anyone prowling round us at night. Wait here, will you, and if he comes round the other corner ask him what his business is.”