ENTER ROSALIE LE GRANGE "Cut, dearie," said Rosalie Le Grange, trance and test clairvoyant, to Hattie, the landlady's daughter. "Now keep your wish in your mind, remember. That's right; a deep cut for luck. U-um. The nine of hearts is your wish--and right beside it is the ace of hearts. That means your home, dearie--the spirits don't lie, even when they're manifestin' themselves just through cards. They guide your hand when you shuffle and cut. Your wish is about the affections, ain't it, dearie?" The pretty slattern across the table nodded. She had put down her dust-pan and leaned her broom across her knees when she sat down to receive the only tip which Rosalie Le Grange, in the existing state of her finances, could give. "I got your wish now, dearie," announced Rosalie Le Grange. "The spirits sometimes help the cards somethin' wonderful. Here it comes. I thought so. The three of hearts for gladness an' rejoicin' right next to the ace, which is your home. Now that might mean a little home of your own, but the influence I git with it is so weak I don't think it means anythin' as strong an' big as that. Wait a minute--now it comes straight an' definite--he'll call--rejoicin' at your home because he'll call. Do you understand that, dearie?" "Sure!" Hattie's eyes were big with awe. "Hat-tie!" came a raucous voice from outside. "Yes-m!" answered Hattie. "Are you going to be all day redding up them rooms?" pursued the voice. "Nearly through!" responded Hattie. Rosalie Le Grange made pantomime of sweeping; and-- "I'll help you red up, my dear," she whispered. Forthwith, they fell to sweeping, dusting, shaking sheets. As she moved about the squeezed little furnished rooms and alcove, which formed her residence and professional offices in these reduced days, Rosalie Le Grange appeared the one thing within its walls which was not common and dingy. A pink wrapper, morning costume of her craft, enclosed a figure grown thick with forty-five, but marvelously well-shaped and controlled. Her wrapper was as neat as her figure; even the lace at the throat was clean. Her long, fair hands, on which the first approach of age appeared as dimples, not as wrinkles or corrugations of the flesh, ran to nails whose polish proved daily care. Her hair, chestnut in the beginning, foamed with white threads. Below was a face which hardly needed, as yet, the morning dab of powder, so craftily had middle age faded the skin without deadening it. Except for a pair of large, gray, long-lashed eyes--too crafty in their corner glances, too far looking in their direct vision--that skin bounded and enclosed nothing which was not attractive and engaging. Her chin was piquantly pointed. Beside a tender, humorous, mobile mouth played two dimples, which appeared and disappeared as she moved about the room delivering monologue to Hattie. "I see a dark gentleman that ain't in your life yet. He's behind a counter now, I think. He ain't the one that the ace of hearts shows is goin' to call. I see you all whirled about between 'em, but I sense nothin' about how it's goin' to turn out--land sakes, child, don't you ever dust behind the pictures? You'll have to be neater if you expect to make a good wife to the dark gentleman--" "Will it be him?" asked Hattie, stopping with a sheet in her hands. "Now the spirits slipped that right out of me, didn't they?" pursued Rosalie. "Land sakes, you can't keep 'em back when they want to talk. Now you just hold that and think over it, dearie. No more for you to-day." Rosalie busied herself with pinning the faded, dusty pink ribbon to a gilded rolling pin, and turned her monologue upon herself: "I ain't sayin' nothin' against this house for the price, dearie, but my, this is a comedown. The last time I done straight clairvoyant work, it was in a family hotel with three rooms and a bath and breakfast in bed. Well, there's ups an' downs in this business. I've been down before and up again--" Hattie, her mouth relieved of a pillowcase, spoke boldly the question in her mind. "What put you down?" Rosalie, her head on one side, considered the arrangement of the pink ribbon, before she answered: "Jealousy, dearie; perfessional jealousy. The Vango trumpet seances were doin' too well to suit that lyin', fakin', Spirit Truth outfit in Brooklyn--wasn't that the bell?" It was. Hattie patted the pillow into place, and sped for the door. "If it's for me," whispered Rosalie, "don't say I'm in--say you'll see." Rosalie bustled about, putting the last touches on the room, pulling shut the bead portières which curtained alcove and bed. Hattie poked her head in the door. "It's a gentleman," she said. "Well, come inside and shut the door--no use tellin' him all about himself," said Rosalie. "I'm--I'm kind of expectin' a gentleman visitor I don't want to see yet. It's a matter of the heart, dearie," she added. "What sort of a looking gentleman?" Hattie stood a moment trying to make articulate her observations. "He's got nice eyes," she said. "And he's dressed quiet but swell. Sort of tall and distinguished." "Did you look at his feet?" For the moment, Rosalie had taken it for granted that all women knew, as she so well knew, the appearance of police feet. "No 'm, not specially," said Hattie. "Well, you'd 'a' noticed," said Rosalie, covering up quickly. "The gentleman I don't want to see has a club foot--show him up, dearie." As Madame Le Grange sat down by the wicker center table and composed her features to professional calm, she was thinking: "If he's a new sitter, I'll have to stall. There's nothing as hard to bite into as a young man dope." The expected knock came. Entered the new sitter--him whom we know as Dr. Walter Huntington Blake, but a stranger to Rosalie. During the formal preliminaries--in which Dr. Blake stated simply that he wanted a sitting and expressed himself as willing to pay two dollars for full trance control--Rosalie studied him and mapped her plan of action. There was, indeed, "nothing to bite into." His shapely clothes bore neither fraternity pin nor society button; his face was comparatively inexpressive; to her attempts at making him chatter, he returned but polite nothings. Only one thing did she "get" before she assumed control. When she made him hold hands to "unite magnetisms," his finger rested for a moment on the base of her palm. She put that little detail aside for further reference, and slid gently into "trance," making the most, as she assumed the slumber pose, of her profile, her plump, well-formed arms, her slender hands. This sitter was "refined"; not for him the groans and contortions of approaching control which so impressed factory girls and shopkeepers. Peeping through her long eyelashes, she noted that his face, while turned upon her in close attention, was without visible emotion. "I must fish," she thought as she began the preliminary gurgles which heralded the coming of Laughing Eyes, her famous Indian child control--"I wonder if I've got to tell him that the influence won't work to-day and I can't get anything? Maybe I'd better." A long silence, broken here and there by guttural gurglings; then Laughing Eyes babbled tentatively: "John--Will--Will--" she choked here, as though trying to add a syllable which she could not clearly catch. And at this point, Rosalie took another look through her eyelashes. She had touched something! He was leaning forward; his mouth had opened. Before she could follow up her advantage, he had thrown himself wide open. "Wilfred--is it Wilfred?" he asked. Laughing Eyes was far too clever a spirit to take immediately an opening so obvious. "You wait a minny!" she said. "Laughing Eyes don't see just right now. Will--Will--he come, he go. Oh--oh--I see a ring--maybe it's on a finger, maybe it ain't--Laughing Eyes kind of a fool this morning--Laughing Eyes has got lots to do for a 'itty girl--" Rosalie had essayed another glance as she spoke of the ring. It brought no visible change of expression; and from the success of her shot with Wilfred she knew that this, in spite of first impressions, was a sitter whose expression betrayed him. "Then it's business troubles," she thought, "unless he's a psychic researcher. And if he was, he wouldn't be so easy with his face." So Laughing Eyes burbled again, and then burst out: "I see a atmosphere of trouble!" The young man's countenance dropped, whereupon Laughing Eyes fell to chattering foolishly before she went on: "Piles of bright 'itty buttons--money--" And then something which had been gently titillating Rosalie's sense of smell made a sudden connection with her memory, Iodoform--the faintest suggestion. She linked this perception with his appearance of having been freshly tubbed, his immaculate finger nails, shining as though fresh from the manicure, his perfectly kept teeth and--yes--the pressure of a finger on her pulse. Upon this perception, Laughing Eyes spoke sharply: "Wilfred says your sick folks don't always pay like they ought. He says when they're in danger they can't do too much for the doctor, but when they're well, he's--he--he--Wilfred is funny--a old sawbones!" "Ask fa--ask him about the patient," faltered Rosalie's sitter. "Wilfred says, 'My son, it's comin' out all right if you follow your own impulses,'" responded Laughing Eyes. "You do the way the influences guide you. They 're guiding you, not them other doctors that you're askin' advice from." Laughing Eyes shifted to babbling of the bright spirit plane beyond, and all that the patient was missing by delay in translation, while Rosalie took another glance of observation, and thought rapidly. Was this patient a medical or surgical case? Two chances out of three, surgical; it would take remorse and apprehension over a mistake with the scalpel to drive a medical man medium-hunting. Her glance at his hands confirmed her determination to venture. They were large and heavy, yet fine, the hands of a craftsman, a forger, a surgeon, anyone who does small and exact work. Rosalie had been in a hospital in her day, and she had studied doctors, as she studied the rest of humanity, with an eye always to future uses. Having a pair of hands like that, a doctor must inevitably choose surgery. "Trust your papa!" babbled the Control. "Laughing Eyes trusted her papa--ugh!--he big Chief. He here now! Your papa knows my papa! Your papa says you didn't cut too deep!" The young man let out an agitated "didn't I?" "You was guided," pursued Laughing Eyes. "What you might'a' thought was a mistake was all for the best. Those in the spirit controlled your hands. Wilfred says 'three'--oh--oh I know what Wilfred means--ugh--get out bad spirit--Wilfred means three days--you wait three days--you wait three days and it will be right." "And now," thought Rosalie Le Grange, "he's got his money's worth, and I'll take no more risks for any two dollars!" Forthwith, she let the voice of Laughing Eyes chuckle lower and lower. "Good-by!" whispered the control at length, "I'm goin' away from my medie!" Then, with a few refined convulsions, Rosalie awoke, rubbed her eyes, and said in her tinkling natural voice: "Was I out long? I hope the sitting was satisfactory." No change came over the young man's face as he said: "From my standpoint--very!" "Thank you," murmured Rosalie. "I was afraid, when you come in, that the influences wasn't going to be strong. A medium can sense them." "Very satisfactory--with modifications," responded the sitter. "For instance, it is absolutely true that I had a father. His name wasn't Wilfred, it was James. And he died before I was born. But don't let that discourage you. I can prove his existence. The other true thing was the corker. I've been to fifty-seven varieties of mediums in the course of this experiment, and you're the first to jump at the widest opening I gave. I am a physician. I've put iodoform on my handkerchief every morning to prove it. I've been listed six times as a commercial traveler, twice as a con man, eight times as a clerk, three times as a policeman, with scattering votes for a reporter, a clergyman, an actor and an undertaker. But you're the first to roll the little ball into the little hole. I am a physician, or was. Better than that, you got it that I specialized on surgery--and I didn't plant that. You draw the capital prize." "Young man," asked Rosalie with an air of shocked and injured innocence, "are you accusing me of fakery?" But despite her stern lips, in Rosalie's cheeks played the ghost of a pair of dimples. They were reflected, so to speak, by twin twinkles in the eyes of her sitter. And he went straight on: "In addition, you're the prettiest of them all, and a cross-eyed man with congenital astigmatism could see that you're a good fellow. Do! My controls tell me that you're about to be offered a good job." "My controls tell me," responded Rosalie Le Grange, "that if you don't quit insultin' a lady in her own house and disgracin' her crown of mediumship, out you go. There's those here that will defend me, I'll have you know!" The young man's face sobered. "I beg your pardon, Mme. Le Grange," he said, "I have been sudden. Would you mind my coming to the point at once? I'm here to offer you a job." Rosalie looked him sternly over a moment, but in the end her dimples triumphed. She lifted her right hand as though to arrange her hair, two fingers extended--the sign in the Brotherhood of Professional Mediums to recognize a fellow craftsman. The young man made no response; Rosalie's eyes flashed back on guard. "How much is this business worth to you?" pursued the young man. "Mediums ain't measuring their rewards by earthly gains," responded Rosalie; and now she made no secret of her dimples. "If we wanted to water our mediumship, couldn't we get rich out of the tips we give people on their business?" "But getting down to the earth plane," the young man continued--and perhaps the twinkles in his eyes were never more obstreperous--"how much would you ask to take a nice, easy job of using your eyes for me?" "Well," said Rosalie, "if there was nothin' unprofessional about it, I should say fifty dollars a week." She smiled on him now openly. "You're a doctor. I don't have to say, as one professional person to another, that there's such a thing as ethics." The young man smiled back. "Oh, certainly!" he said. "I understand that!" Quite suddenly he leaned forward and clapped Rosalie's shoulder with a motion that had nothing offensive about it--only good fellowship and human understanding--"I want you to help me expose Mrs. Paula Markham." The announcement stiffened Rosalie. She sat bolt upright. "There ain't nothin' to expose!" she said. "Now let's get on a business basis," said the young man. "Well, you let me tell you one thing first. If you're pumpin' me for evidence, it don't go, because you've got no witnesses." "I'm not pumping you for anything. I'm willing to admit that the spirits, not you, smelled the iodoform--" "An' noticed that you was scrubbed clean as a whistle and that when we held hands to unite our magnetism, you was pawing for my pulse," pursued Rosalie, dropping her defences all at once. Thereupon, Roman haruspex looked into the eyes of Roman haruspex, and they both laughed. But Rosalie was serious enough a moment later. "Now when you come to talk about exposing Mrs. Markham, you've got to show me first why you want her exposed, and you've got to let me tell you that you're wastin' your money. There's enough that's fake about this profession, but I know two mediums I'd stake my life on; barring of course myself"--here Rosalie smiled a smile which might have meant a confession or a boast, so balanced was it between irony and sweetness--"Mrs. Markham and Mrs. Anna Fife. They're real." She peered into the face of her investigator. His expression showed skeptical amusement. She knew that her passion for talking too much was her greatest professional flaw; though had she thought it over maturely, she would have realized that she had never got into trouble through her tongue. Her trained instinct for human values led her inevitably to those who would appreciate her confidences and keep them. So the sudden retreat within her defences, which followed, proved irritation rather than suspicion. "See here," she pursued, "are you a psychic researcher?" "Cross my heart," answered the young man, "I never associated with spooks in my life until this week. I did it then because I wanted a first-class professional medium to take a good job." "Investigating Mrs. Markham? What for? Has she got a cinch on a relative of yours?" "Well, I'd like her for a relative," started the young man. Then he hesitated and for the first time faltered. A light blush began at the roots of his hair and overspread his face. "I got that you were a physician," said Rosalie, "but there's one place I got you plumb wrong. I thought it was business troubles. So the trouble's your heart and affections! It's that big-eyed blonde niece of Markham's, of course. Well, you ain't the first. The best way to bring the young men like a flock of blackbirds is to shut a girl away from 'em." Now the young man showed real surprise. "How did you know?" he enquired. "My controls an' guides, of course," responded Rosalie. "They couldn't find anybody else to fall in love with around the Markham house--ain't as smart as you thought you was, are you?" "Beside you," he responded, "I'm Beppo the Missing Link." Rosalie acknowledged the compliment, and turned to business. "I ain't asking you how I'm going about it," she said; "probably you've planted that. I am asking you if you're willing to risk fifty a week on a pig in a poke? I know about her; we all do. She's just like Mrs. Fife. The Psychic Researchers have written up Mrs. Fife, but they ain't got half of her. They miss the big things, just like they get fooled on the little things. We know. And we know about Mrs. Markham, too, though she's had sense enough to keep shut up from the professors. "You're a skeptic," pursued Rosalie, "and I'm blowin' my breath to cool a house afire when I talk to you. I guess I just talk to hear myself talk. We start real. I did; we all do. With some of us it's a big streak an' with some it's a little. I was pretty big--pretty big. Things happen; voices and faces. Things that are true right out of the air, and things that ain't true--all mixed up with what you're thinking yourself. It comes just when it wants to, not when you want it. And the longer you go on, and the more horse sense you get, the less it comes." Rosalie stopped a moment, and veiled her eyes with her lashes, as though speaking out of trance. "Everyone of us says to herself, 'It won't leave me!' An' we start to practice. What are we goin' to do then? You git a sitter. She pays her two dollars. And they don't come perhaps. Not for that sitter, or the next sitter, or the next. But you have to give the value for the two dollars or go out of business. So some day, you guess. That's the funny thing about this business, anyway. Lots of times you ain't quite sure whether guessing did it, or spirits. I've glimpsed the ring on a girl's left hand, and right then my voices have said, 'Engaged!' Now was it me makin' that voice, or the spirit? I don't know. But when you begin to guess, you find how easy people are--how they swallow fakes and cry for more. As sitters go, fakin' gets 'em a lot harder than the real stuff. An' before long--it's easy--you're slipping the slates or bringing spooks from cabinets--let me tell you no medium ever did that genuine. But it's funny how long the real thing stays. Now you--I called your father Wilfred. Maybe I'll wake up to-morrow night, seein' your face, and a voice will come right out of the air and say a name--and it'll be yours. It's happened; it will happen again; but generally when I can't make any use of it. "I'm goin' a long way round to get home. There's some so big that they don't have to fake. Sometimes, of course, the controls won't come to them, but they can afford to tell a sitter they can't sense nothin', because the next sitter will get the real stuff--the stuff you can't fake. Mrs. Fife is that way. I've seen her work and I know. I know just as well about Mrs. Markham, though I haven't seen her. She keeps tight shut up away from the rest of us. She never mixes. But some of us have seen her, they've passed it on. "Mediums," added Rosalie Le Grange, after a pause, "is a set of pipe dreamers as a class, but there's one place where you can take their word like it was sworn to on the Bible. It's when they say somebody has the real thing. Because mediums is knockers, and when they pass out a bouquet, you can bet they mean it. No, young man, Mrs. Markham, if she does play a lone hand, is the real thing. But I may help you waste your money." The young man had lost his air of cynical levity, he was regarding Rosalie Le Grange somewhat as a collector regards a new and unclassified species. "Why?" he asked. "Who's the greatest doctor in the world?" asked Mme. Le Grange. "Watkins, I suppose," responded the young man. "What'd you give for a chance to stay in his office a month and see him work? See?" He nodded his head. "Of course." "I was a darned little fool when I was young," pursued Rosalie Le Grange, "an' now that I'm gettin' on in years I'm just as darned an old one. I like to take chances. See?" "Mme. Le Grange," said her sitter, again clapping her rounded shoulder, "you're a fellow after my heart." "Just a second before we come to the bouquets," responded Rosalie Le Grange, "there's another reason. Can you guess it?" "I've already given up guessing on you." On the table beside Mme. Le Grange lay an embroidery frame, the needle set in a puffy red peony. Mme. Le Grange picked it up and took a stitch or two. Her head bent over her work, so that the playful light made gold of the white in her chestnut hair, she pursued: "Maybe you specialize on mendin' people's bones and maybe your specialty is their insides. I've got a specialty, too. You see, in this business it's easy to go all to the bad unless you do somethin' for other people. You have to have a kind of religion to tie to. Mine is unitin' and reunitin' lovin' hearts. Of course you're saying that this is a lot of foolishness. Never mind." She paused a moment, and plied the needle. "What's the trouble between you and that slim little niece of Mrs. Markham's that you want her aunt exposed? An' can't I fix it some other way?" "What do you know about Miss Markham?" asked the sitter. "I've opened myself up to you like a school-girl in a cosey corner chat," said Rosalie Le Grange; "ain't it time you was doin' some confidin'?" "Did you ever hear that Miss Markham had been brought up to be a medium? That she mustn't marry because it would destroy her powers? That she's been taught to believe that she will never develop fully until she's put aside an earthly love?" "O-ho!" quoth Rosalie; "so that's the way the wind sets! My! I must say that's the fakiest thing I ever heard about Mrs. Markham. We all know that a medium's born. This dark room developin' seance work is bosh to stall the dopes along. Still, Mrs. Markham has always played a lone hand. She's never mixed with other mediums, which is why I'll be safe in goin' into her house--she won't recognize me. Probably she's kept some fool notions that the rest of us lost long ago. But the poor little puss!"--her voice sank to a ripple--"the poor little puss!" Her eyes grew tender, and tenderly they met the softened eyes of the young man. "Just robbin' her of her girlhood! I wonder"--her voice grew harder as she turned to practical consideration of the subject--"if Mrs. Markham got the idea from them Yogis and adepts and things that she mixed with in India. Just like 'em. They've got the real thing, but they're little, crawling Dagoes with no more blood in 'em than a swarm of horseflies." "It is terrible to think of," said the sitter. "You poor dear, I should say so!" responded Rosalie. "Of course, I see what you want done. If I can prove that Mrs. Markham is a fake, then I prove to the girl that it's all bosh about her not marrying. I can't give you no encouragement as far as exposin' goes, seem' 's I know Mrs. Markham is real, but if I'm on the ground, maybe I can fix it some other way. How are you goin' to git me into the house?" "This week," responded her co-conspirator, "Mrs. Markham will advertise for a housekeeper. I suppose you can play housekeeper well enough to keep the place a month, can't you?" "If there's anythin' I can do," responded Rosalie, "it's keep house. Is it a big house?" "Three stories--three or four servants, I suppose." "That's good; I'll enjoy it; I never had a chance at that!" "Remember you must get the place from the other applicants." "If my mediumship hasn't taught me enough to git me a plain job, it hasn't taught me nothin'," responded Rosalie. "Then it's as good as done," answered the young man. "Shall I pay you now or later? Mrs. Markham's salary will be your tip." "It's a good paymaster that pays when the job's got," answered Rosalie. Her sitter rose, as though to go. "Confidences is like love," said Rosalie, "first sight or not for ten years. Here I've opened my whole bag of tricks, and yours is locked tight. Don't you think you might tell me your name?" The young man reached for a card. "Dr. Blake," he said as he fumbled. "Walter Huntington Blake, Curfew Club," corrected Rosalie. His hands dropped, and he stared. "How--how--" "Spirits--my kind." Rosalie extended her hand. In it rested his little card case. "Excuse me. I done it just to show you I wasn't quite a darn fool, if I do tell everything I know to a stranger. Now don't get silly an' think from this marvelous demonstration that I've been givin' you a con talk. It's just a lesson not to take your card case along when you visit a medium. It's a proof that I can expose Mrs. Markham if there 's anything to expose. Good-by Dr. Blake, and good luck." The following Wednesday, at eight o'clock in the morning, a messenger boy woke Mme. Le Grange by prolonged knocking. He passed in this note: Answer early the third advertisement, third column, sixth page, in the Herald Help Wanted column. From the address, I know it is Mrs. M.'s. W.H. BLAKE.