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“That’s undoubtedly blood,” I looked up at her. “It was a human hand, anyway. I should say that only a human hand would bleed.”

“Why, did you think it was something that wasn’t human?” she asked quickly.

“Well, I didn’t know quite what to think,” I said frankly, ‘‘to tell you the truth. I hadn’t thought of it as a ghost, of course, but when you see a man choked to death right before your eyes, and you can’t see the hand that is doing it, you’re apt to think almost anything. Of course, in my report, I didn’t say that Arnold had been choked to death by a ghost, you know. Unless we give human and earthly explanations to things, we could never make any headway in solving this kind of a case, could we?”

‘‘And suppose your human explanations, as you call them, don’t connect up with the facts as we know them? What then?”

“Well, we have to make them connect up, then. Not an awful lot of murderers go undiscovered, you know,” I said.

“Well, very few murders present the appearance of this one,” she countered.

“Every murder has its particular points of difference from all others. It’s only in the broad general details that they resemble each other.”

“I know, but the facts in this case are so different