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136 suppose that it comes from her, that her signature is genuine, just as I believe Martin's to be. Do you really think that when I was a poor little consumptive chap at Grives I was really possessed by an evil spirit? Isn't that rather too horrible an imagining? A nice state the next world must be in, if that sort of thing is allowed! I don't for a moment think it is. Can you reconcile with the idea of supreme Love governing and creating all life, the notion that there, behind the scenes, there are evil and awful beings who can get leave to communicate with a child, as I was, pretending to be the spirit of the brother I never knew? Does it sound likely?"

Jessie paused a moment again. She hated the subject, she hated the idea of Archie's being concerned in these dim avenues to the unseen. She had, for herself, a perfectly unreasoning and childlike faith that there was this world, and the next world, and that God reigned supreme over both. But somehow it offended this instinctive attitude that the next world, and those who had gone there, should be mixed up with this world. They were not dead; she did not think they had ceased to exist; but they had done with this world, and it was something like a profanity to meddle with them. But then Archie had not meddled, as he most truly said: they seemed to have meddled with him. Their meddling had stopped altogether for a dozen years, and here on this half-sheet of paper was the evidence that something of the sort had begun again.

"I thought you had dropped all interest in it," she said. "I thought it was all finished, like a childish fairy-story, like the Abracadabra legend Cousin Marion told me about. Oh, there's tea: shall we have tea?"

Pasqualino had spread their table underneath the stone-pine, and she hailed this as a possible dismissal of the whole affair. She did not want to talk any