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Lady Laura had sat down that night in a state of mind which she could not analyze It was not that her anxieties had been lulled so nant and heavy, but on the other side there had been the assured air of the medium, his reasonableness and his personality, as well as the enthusiasm of her friend, and her astonished remonstrances She had decided to acquiesce, not because she was satisfied, but because on the whole anxiety was outweighed by confidence She could not have taken action under such circumstances, but she could at least refrain from it

Laurie, as Mr Parker had noticed, had been "quiet-like"; he had said very little indeed, but a nervous strain was evident in the brightness of his eyes; but in answer to a conventional inquiry he had declared himself extremely well Mr Vincent had looked at hier than usual as he shook hands, but he said nothing Mrs Stapleton had arded the boy's sensitive faculties

At the beginning of the séance theof trance, and had added one or two other precautions Then he had gone into the cabinet; the fire had been pressed down under ashes, and a single candle lighted and placed behind the angle of the little adjoining rooht fell upon the cabinet only and the figure of the medium within

When the silence becae of wind and rain outside The very intensity of the interior stillness and the rapture of attention eree the windy roar without Yet the silence seemed to her, now as always, to have a peculiar faculty of detaching the psychical from the physical atmosphere In spite of the batter of rain not ten feet away, the sighing between the shutters, and even the lift now and again of the heavy curtains in the draught, she see in the dark under some ruin feel himself at an almost infinite distance from the pick and the hammer of the rescuers These were in one world, she in another

For over an hour nothe fire, Laurie on her left looking towards the cabinet with his back to the s, Mrs Stapleton opposite to her

An endless procession of thoughts defiled before her as she sat, yet these too were somewhat remote--far up, so to speak, on the superficies of consciousness: they did not approach that reale of existence Once and again she glanced up withouther head at the three-quarter profile on her left, at the soain at the polished little round table and the six hands laid upon it And hts, nettes, so to speak,--old Mr Cathcart in his spats and frock-coat, the look on the ain in an instant as he had heard the stranger's name; the carved oak stalls of the chancel towards which she had faced this , the look of the park, the bloom upon the still leafless trees, the radiance of the blue spring sky