However, curiously enough, the table did not move.  Instead, my watch, before my eyes, slid to the edge of the table and dropped to the floor, and almost instantly an object, which we recognized later as Sperry’s knife, was flung over the curtain and struck the wall behind Mrs. Dane violently.

One of the women screamed, ending in a hysterical giggle.  Then we heard rhythmic beating on the top of the stand behind the medium.  Startling as it was at the beginning, increasing as it did from a slow beat to an incredibly rapid drumming, when the initial shock was over Herbert commenced to gibe.

“Your fountain pen, Horace,” he said to me.  “Making out a statement for services rendered, by its eagerness.”

The answer to that was the pen itself, aimed at him with apparent accuracy, and followed by an outcry from him.

“Here, stop it!” he said.  “I’ve got ink all over me!”

We laughed consumedly.  The sitting had taken on all the attributes of practical joking.  The table no longer quivered under my hands.

“Please be sure you are holding my hands tight.  Hold them very tight,” said Miss Jeremy.  Her voice sounded faint and far away.  Her head was dropped forward on her chest, and she suddenly sagged in her chair.  Sperry broke the circle and coming to her, took her pulse.  It was, he reported, very rapid.

“You can move and talk now if you like,” he said.  “She’s in trance, and there will be no more physical demonstrations.”

Mrs. Dane was the first to speak.  I was looking for my fountain pen, and Herbert was again examining the stand.

“I believe it now,” Mrs. Dane said.  “I saw your watch go, Horace, but tomorrow I won’t believe it at all.”

“How about your companion?” I asked.  “Can she take shorthand?  We ought to have a record.”

“Probably not in the dark.”

“We can have some light now,” Sperry said.

There was a sort of restrained movement in the room now.  Herbert turned on a bracket light, and I moved away the roller chair.

“Go and get Clara, Horace,” Mrs. Dane said to me, “and have her bring a note-book and pencil.”  Nothing, I believe, happened during my absence.  Miss Jeremy was sunk in her chair and breathing heavily when I came back with Clara, and Sperry was still watching her pulse.  Suddenly my wife said: 

“Why, look!  She’s wearing my bracelet!”

This proved to be the case, and was, I regret to say, the cause of a most unjust suspicion on my wife’s part.  Even today, with all the knowledge she possesses, I am certain that Mrs. Johnson believes that some mysterious power took my watch and dragged it off the table, and threw the pen, but that I myself under cover of darkness placed her bracelet on Miss Jeremy’s arm.  I can only reiterate here what I have told her many times, that I never touched the bracelet after it was placed on the stand.