“And my next theory is this ... is this”—­Maggie sipped her tea meditatively—­“my next theory is that the whole thing was simple imagination, or, rather, imagination acting upon a few little facts and coincidences, and perhaps a little fraud too.  Do you know the way, if you’re jealous or irritable, the way in which everything seems to fit in?  Every single word the person you’re suspicious of utters all fits in and corroborates your idea.  It isn’t mere imagination:  you have real facts, of a kind; but what’s the matter is that you choose to take the facts in one way and not another.  You select and arrange until the thing is perfectly convincing.  And yet, you know, in nine cases out of ten it’s simply a lie...!  Oh!  I can’t explain all the things, certainly.  I can’t explain, for instance, the pencil affair—­when it stood up on end before Laurie’s eyes; that is, if it did really stand up at all.  He says himself that the whole thing seems rather dim now, as if he had seen it in a very vivid dream. (Have one of these sugar things?)

“Then there are the appearances Laurie saw; and the extraordinary effect they finally had upon him.  Oh! yes; at the time, on the night of Easter Eve, I mean, I was absolutely certain that the thing was real, that he was actually obsessed, that the thing—­the Personality, I mean—­came at me instead, and that somehow I won.  Mr. Cathcart tells me I’m right—­Well; I’ll come to that presently.  But if it didn’t happen, I certainly can’t explain what did; but there are a good many things one can’t explain; and yet one doesn’t instantly rush to the conclusion that they’re done by the devil.  People say that we know very little indeed about the inner working of our own selves.  There’s instinct, for instance.  We know nothing about that except that it is so.  ‘Inherited experience’ is only rather a clumsy phrase—­a piece of paper gummed up to cover a crack in the wall.

“And that brings me to my third theory.”

Maggie poured out for herself a second cup of tea.

“My third theory I’m rather vague about, altogether.  And yet I see quite well that it may be the true one. (Please don’t interrupt till I’ve quite done.)

“We’ve got in us certain powers that we don’t understand at all.  For instance, there’s thought-projection.  There’s not a shadow of doubt that that is so.  I can sit here and send you a message of what I’m thinking about—­oh! vaguely, of course.  It’s another form of what we mean by Sympathy and Intuition.  Well, you know, some people think that haunted houses can be explained by this.  When the murder is going on, the murderer and the murdered person are probably fearfully excited—­anger, fear, and so on.  That means that their whole being is stirred up right to the bottom, and that their hidden powers are frightfully active.  Well, the idea is that these hidden powers are almost like acids, or gas—­Hudson tells us all about that—­and that they can actually stamp themselves upon the room to such a degree that when a sympathetic person comes in, years afterwards, perhaps, he sees the whole thing just as it happened.  It acts upon his mind first, of course, and then outwards through the senses—­just the reverse order to that in which we generally see things.