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Updated: May 19, 2025
Her lips were close to his ear. In the creepy tension of the waiting Orme had almost forgotten that Madame Alia's ghosts were a cheat, and the touch of her hand made him start, but her first words brought him to himself. "Hush!" she whispered. "You'll get your chance in a minute. Put on a pair of black felt slippers. Here" she groped along the floor, and gave him the slippers.
After the end of the grand "birthday banquet," which lasted for a day and two nights, Alia's position at the palace became more disagreeable than ever.
Yet strong as this friendship was, and enthusiastic as was the love of Judy for her "rosy-cheeked" favorite, they were not sufficient to cause her to reveal the secret of her birth and adoption, even at this hour of Alia's deepest grief and affliction. There were two causes for this her unaccountable silence.
With as little delay as possible, he sought the office of his legal adviser, and, accompanied by a judge of the Supreme Court of eminent character, and the legal adviser, and a third, all Protestant gentlemen, he sought the sick chamber of the old negress again, and there her deposition, and a confirmation of her previous account of Alia's bringing up and captivity, were obtained.
It wavered, advanced, halted, then seemed to rush. The séance the afternoon was fresh in the mind of the Japanese. With screams of terror, he turned and fled down the drive, while Orme, removing the veil from the stick, moved on toward the house. Madame Alia's game certainly was effective in dealing with Orientals.
From other sounds Orme gathered that the woman was arranging chairs. "Sit here, you two," he heard her say. "You'll have to keep quiet when the rest come. Do just what they do? Be sure, now." The bell now began to ring at frequent intervals, each time announcing the arrival of newcomers. Madame Alia's clients were quickly assembling; Orme could hear them whispering among themselves.
The card bore the name: "Madame Alia, Clairvoyant and Trance Medium." "I think I will have my fortune told," muttered Orme, as he pressed Madame Alia's bell and started up the stairs. At the top of the second flight he looked to the entrance of the front apartment. It had a large square of ground glass, with the name "Arima" in black letters.
The enclosure seemed to extend all the way across the side of the room. Farther along, lying on the floor and standing against the wall, were contrivances of which at first he could make nothing poles, pieces of tin, and were those masks, heaped in the corner? From a row of pegs hung long robes white and black. The truth flashed into Orme's mind. He was in Madame Alia's ghost-closet!
He held them up for Orme to take. "You have me beat," he said. "Spirit told me I must fail." A picture of the scene in Madame Alia's rooms came to Orme; the darkness broken only by a pinpoint of gaslight; the floating, ghostly forms; the circle of awed believers, with the two Japanese, intent as children. The medium's work for him had not ended when she helped him to escape.
From his knowledge of Madame Alia's apartment, Orme knew that this door opened into the hall of the building, and the square of ground glass, with its reversed letters of the athlete's name, told him that it was used as the chief entrance. Madame Alia preferred her clients to enter into another room. In the farther corner of the interior Orme saw a large square table.
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