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from anything I ever heard of that— ” she still persisted.

“Look here,” I demanded. ‘‘Are you trying to tell me that you think a ghost murdered poor Arnold. Because if you are, you will have to⸺”

“Not at all,” she said. “Only I was trying to see some other explanation that was more logical, and I confess that I can’t see it, that’s all. You say it was a human hand that did it, and you tell me that you know it was human because you stuck a knife into it and it bled, but I don’t think it proves it quite conclusively. How could a human hand be invisible—and how could it dissolve into thin air? And how could it be separated from the rest of its body—because a human hand would have to have a body too, wouldn’t it? How do you know that a ghost cannot bleed. Have you ever⸺”

I laughed a little. “No, I'll admit that I never stuck a knife into a ghost, so that I am not quite qualified to say that a ghost cannot bleed, but the law of probability⸺”

“There’s no such thing as probability with a ghost. That in itself would be a defiance of all probability, so I think you cannot reason on that basis. No, I don’t think that a ghost did it, any more than you do . . . but it is queer, isn’t it?”

“It is,” I said. “To tell you the truth, I myself