Page:The strange experiences of Tina Malone.djvu/62

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But when Monday came the "voices" were so bad again that I made up my mind to go to see Sybil to see if she could tell me what they were and how to deal with them. I begged Kitty to go over to her with a note to ask if I could see her about some literary question.

Back came the answer to go to afternoon tea with her.

On the way over I seemed somehow to hear her voice among the many.

It said:

"I can't tell you much, I can only blink my eyes. If I blink my eyes three times it means 'yes'—if I blink once it means 'no,' but that is all I can do."

It seemed rather little but I felt like a drowning man catching at straws—I supposed it was some of the silly occult school's secret ways.

So I went over.

I had to go through the little social formality of afternoon tea with her family. I noticed that the maid looked at me with rather an amused smile in her eyes as she brought it in.

Although outwardly I was calm enough, trying to keep up the farce of social platitudes, inwardly I felt I must find some clue to these terrible, worrying, taunting voices or I should go mad.

So I watched for the blink of the eyes.

Sybil was always full of silly little artifices and liked to play the actress.

I asked a few questions in inuendo and blinked my own eyes as hard as I could.

She ducked her head under the table. I knew perfectly well she was smiling—I forgave it in her, but I did not forgive it in the maid's eyes and neither did "Patrick" for a voice said suddenly to me:

"Come away, she is not your friend."

But when I was at the gate I told her of the voices.

"You're psychic, that's what it is," she said. "I always told you you were, you know," and she leant forward to look hard into my eyes in the half-mocking way she always had—"You've become clairaudient."

"What's clairaudient?" I asked.

"You hear things that are going on round you that other people cannot hear. You're highly developed, that's what it is."

But still my mind was full of fears and I could not tell her all I was going through.