I shut the door with a snap, and begged her to be so good as to explain herself.

“It’s of no use,” she said, doggedly.  “You know you won’t believe me.  But that makes no difference.  They come all the same.”

“They?” asked Allis, smiling.  “Do you mean some of your spirits?”

The cold little woman flushed.  “These are not my spirits.  I know nothing about them.  I did not mean to obtrude a subject so disagreeable to you while I was in your family; but I have seldom been in a house in which the Influences were so strong.  I don’t know what they mean, nor anything about them, but just that they’re here.  They wake me up, twitching my elbows, nearly every night.”

“Wake you up how?”

“Twitching my elbows,” she repeated, gravely.

I broke into a laugh, from which neither my politeness nor the woman’s heightened color could save me, bought the cat and ordered the rat-trap without delay.

That night, when Miss Fellows had “retired,”—­she never “went to bed” in simple English like other people,—­I stole softly out in my stockings and screwed a little brass button outside of her door.  I had made a gimlet-hole for it in the morning when our guest was out shopping; it fitted into place without noise.  Without noise I turned it, and went back to my own room.

“You suspect her, then?” said Alison.

“One is always justified in suspecting a Spiritualistic medium.”

“I don’t know about that,” Allis said, decidedly.  “It may have been mice that I heard last night, or the wind in a bottle, or any of the other proper and natural causes that explain away the ghost stories in the children’s papers; but it was not Gertrude.  Women know something about one another, my dear; and I tell you it was not Gertrude.”

“I don’t assert that it was; but with the bolt on Gertrude’s door, the cat in the kitchen, and the rat-trap on the garret stairs, I am strongly inclined to anticipate a peaceful night.  I will watch for a while, however, and you can go to sleep.”

She went to sleep, and I watched.  I lay till half past eleven with my eyes staring at the dark, wide awake and undisturbed and triumphant.

At half past eleven I must confess that I heard a singular sound.

Something whistled at the keyhole.  It could not have been the wind, by the way, for there was no wind that night.  Something else than the wind whistled in at the keyhole, sighed through into the room as much like a long-drawn breath as anything, and fell with a slight clink upon the floor.