Page:Weird Tales Volume 27 Issue 01 (1936-01).djvu/19

Rh points which I should like to be enlightened on. By example, you have seen these manifestations in the form of force a number of times, you have smelled the perfume which Madame your ci-devante wife affected. You have seen her outline under cloth, and you, as well as Madame Taviton, have felt the contact of her ghostly flesh, but have you ever seen her in ocular manifestation?"

"N-o," answered Frazier thoughtfully, "I don't believe we have." Suddenly he brightened. "You think perhaps it's not Elaine at all?" he asked. "Possibly it's one of those strange cases of self-imposed hypnosis, like those they say the Hindoo fakirs stimulate among their audiences to make it seem they do those seemingly impossible"

"Pardonnez-moi, Monsieur, I think nothing at all, as yet," the little Frenchman interrupted. "I am searching, seeking, trying to collect my data, that I may arrange it in an orderly array. Suppose I were a chemist. A patron brings me a white powder for analysis. He cannot tell me much about it, he does not know if it is poisonous or not, only that it is a plain white powder and he wishes to be told its composition. There are a hundred formulas for me to choose from, so the first step is to segregate as many as I can; to find out what our so mysterious powder is definitely not before I can determine what it is. You could appreciate my difficulty in the circumstances? Very well, we are here in much the same predicament. Indeed, we are in worse case, for while chemistry is scientifically exact, occultism is the newest of the sciences, less than half emerged from silly magic and sillier superstition. It has not even a precise nomenclature by which one occultist can make his observations fully understood by others. The terminology is so vague that it is almost meaningless. What we call 'ghosts' may be a dozen different sorts of things. 'Spirits?' Possibly. But what sort of spirits? Spirits that are earthbound, having shed their fleshly envelopes, yet being unable to proceed to their proper loci? If so, why do they linger here? what can we do to help them on their way? Or are they possibly the spirits of the blessed, come from Paradise? If so, what is their helpful mission? how can we assist them? Spirits of the damned, perhaps? What has given them their passeport jaune from hell? By blue, Monsieur, there are many things we must consider before we can commence to think about your case!"

"I see," the other nodded. "And the first thing to consider is"

"Mrs. Taviton, sor!" announced Nora McGinnis from the study doorway.

came walking toward us rapidly, the tips of silver slippers flashing with swift intermittence from beneath the hem of her white-satin dinner frock. Time had dealt leniently with Agnes Taviton. The skin of her clear-cut oval face was fresh and youthful as a girl's, despite her almost forty years; her short, waved hair, brushed straight back from her broad forehead, was bright as mountain honey, and there were no telltale wrinkles at the comers of her frank gray eyes. Yet there was a line of worry in her forehead and a look of fear in her fine eyes as she acknowledged my quick introduction and turned to Frazier.

"Dear,” she exclaimed, "the emeralds, they're—she"

"Pardonnez-moi, Madame," de Grandin interrupted. "Monsieur your husband has recounted how your pearls were taken; now, are we to understand that other jewels"

"Yes," she answered breathlessly, "to-night! My husband gave the emerald earrings to me—they had been his great-great-grandmother's—and as the stones