She suppressed a sob.
“I will,” she said. “The book was there all the time. I put it into an old cover called ‘Elegant Extracts . . . ’ But I’m not wholly a fraud. We’re talking together, you a spirit and I a mortal female. They can’t hear us talk. But only look at me, and you’ll see . . . You can talk to them through me, if you’ll only be so kind. I don’t often get in touch with a genuine spirit like yourself.”
Mr. Tilly glanced at the other sitters and then back to the medium, who, to keep the others interested, was making weird gurgling noises like an undervitalised siphon. Certainly she was far clearer to him than were the others, and her argument that she was able to see and hear him had great weight. And then a new and curious perception came to him. Her mind seemed spread out befo
