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VII

December the first.

There have been no more telephonic mysteries; the call-bell hangs mute all night. I think Eliot has been ordered to sleep with his door open. Only the banshee parts her lips, and there are times when she wails from bedtime till breakfast; usually this happens with a west wind. The doctor is absorbed, and the horizontal lines of anxiety in his forehead are heavily carved. I cannot make out what he is thinking, for I am never told unless he chooses to have me know, while yet, oddly enough, I do not feel at all hurt if he does not tell. It was, in fact, three days after the last midnight summons before I knew that he had succeeded in tracing the first telephone call to its source. The company, it seems, had put every agency at his disposal, and had hunted down this last message. Twelve hundred miles between it and me! It had started from one of the uttermost stations where the blue bell hangs; beyond which there is no practicable

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