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“even if the professor has convinced Mrs Canby that they can bring her messages from the dead.”
    “You don’t understand,” said Ella. “Dora Canby doesn’t think they bring her messages from the dead. She thinks that Gloria Canby has come to life again in the body of Sheila Kelly.”
    I made a grimace, but the protest into which I was about to plunge was forestalled by an exclamation from the handsome young woman sitting beside Jeff Wayne.
    “Hogan!” she cried with, it seemed to me, genuine astonishment.
    A man had come into the dining room, a good-looking, debonair young man with a desiccated face and extremely sophisticated eyes.
    “Hallo, everybody,” he murmured, making straight for Lila Atwood.
    Even then I noticed what a striking couple they made, sleek dark Hogan Brewster and Lila Atwood with her shingled, blue-black hair and brilliant dark eyes above a restrained though sensitive red mouth.
    “Darling,” she murmured, “how ever did you find us?”
    He grinned. “I put the bloodhounds on the trail,” he said. “How are you, Allan?”
    For a moment I thought Allan Atwood was going to strike the other man, then he seemed to make a terrific effort to pull himself together.
    “I’m all right,” he muttered. “Have you had dinner? Will you join us?”
    “Will I?” exclaimed the other, laughing as he pulled out a chair. “If you don’t think it was a nightmare driving up that mountain in this storm, you’re loopy. A dozen times I thought I was a goner.”
    “Yes?” murmured Lila Atwood’s husband. He did not add, “No such luck,” but he looked as if he wanted to, and I raised my eyes at Ella, who nodded.
    “The old, old triangle,” she said. “The affair has been an open scandal for months.”
    She went into some detail on the subject while I covertly watched Allan trying with poor success to act as if he were unaware of Hogan’s bold flirtation with Lila under her husband’s very nose.
    According to Ella, Dora Canby had had two sisters, both now dead.
    Judy Oliver and her brother Patrick were the children of the younger sister, Allan Atwood the only child of the elder. Thomas Canby had had his wife’s niece and nephews about his neck for a number of years or so I gathered. At any rate he had given them a home and educated them and taken both the boys into his business in a minor capacity.
    “One of those fifth or sixth vice-president affairs with which rich men take care of their ineffectual hangers-on,” explained Ella.
    There was something ineffectual about Allan Atwood’s face, I thought to myself, although he was rather attractive in a vague way.
    He had regular features and thick, slightly curly brown hair, and a cleft chin, but he gave the impression of being too loosely knit, as if he might ravel under strain. Even the movements of his well-kept hands were uncertain, and his grey eyes were slightly bloodshot.
    There was nothing vague about his wife. She had been a famous beauty, so Ella said, and she had all the poise of a woman accustomed to being singled out for her looks. She belonged to a blue-blooded Maryland family, one of those aristocratic branches which, while run to seed financially, manage to cling to a place in the social register. Ella said she was supposed to be a superb horsewoman, and I could easily imagine Lila Atwood with her long limbs and straight back putting a thoroughbred at a five-foot fence without batting an eye.
    “I suppose the only horse the husband can ride is a wooden one in a merry-go-round,” I murmured, staring at Allan, who had managed to upset his water glass in his lap and who coloured darkly when everybody, especially Hogan Brewster, laughed at the mishap.
    Ella nodded. “He has a perfect genius for tripping over his own feet. It’s painful to watch him. Judy says he was always like that, awkward and self-conscious, only it’s been worse since his marriage.
    He’s hopeless at all the things at which his wife excels — she and