propped against the back of the armchair, move ever so little sideways, as the neck-muscles relaxed. His hands opened, the knife dropped on his knee and he was to all appearances peacefully asleep. Presently his even, regular breathing was a sound more apparent than the tick of the clock outside.
All of a sudden Mrs. Llewellyn felt herself ridiculous. Here she was, holding a childish toy, facing a strange man with whom she was entirely alone and who was apparently enjoying a needed snooze. She had an impulse to laugh and was on the point of rising, disembarrassing herself of her burden and leaving the house.
At that instant she felt a movement between the fast-shut slates. They lay level upon her lap, firmly set. She had not jarred or tilted them, yet she felt the pencil move. Felt it move and heard it too. Her mood of impatient self-contempt and irritated derision was instantly obliterated under a wave of terrified awe. She controlled a spasm of panic, an impulse to let go her hold upon her frightful charge, to scream, to run away. Rigid, trembling, breathing quick, her heart hammering her ribs, she sat, her fingers gripping the slates, listening for another movement. It came. Faintly at first, she felt and heard it, then more distinctly. Slowly, very slowly, with intervals of silence, the bit of pencil crawled, tapped and scratched about. While listening to it, and still more while listening for it, she was under so terrific a tension that she felt if nothing happened to relieve her, she must faint or shriek. When she continued listening for a long, an interminable, an unbearable time and heard nothing but the clock in the hall and Vargas' breathing in the room, she felt she was about to do both.
Then the clairvoyant uttered a choked sound, the incipience of that feeble wailing groan or groaning wail of a sleeper in a nightmare. His feet moved, his undeformed leg stiffened, his hands clenched, his head rolled from side to side, he writhed, the effort expended at each successive groan was more and more excessive, each sound feebler and more pitiful.
Then Mrs. Llewellyn did scream.
Instantly Vargas struggled into a sitting posture, his face contorted, his eyes bulging, staring at her.
“Did I speak, did I speak?” he gasped.
Mrs. Llewellyn was past articulation, but she shook her head. “I passed into a real trance, a real trance,” he babbled.
She could only cling to the slate and gaze.
“I had a frightful dream,” Vargas panted, “I dreamed there was a message on the plate. It frightened me, but what it was has escaped me.”
“There is a message on the slate,” she managed to utter, “I heard the pencil writing.” Vargas, holding to the back of his chair, assisted himself to his feet. From her fingers, mechanically clenched on it, he gently disengaged the slate and put it on the table. Opening one of the cabinets he took out a decanter and two glasses, half filling one he placed it in her numb grasp.
“Drink that,” he dictated, draining the other full glass as he spoke.
Half dazed she obeyed him. Her face flushed angrily and the glass broke as she set it down. “You have given me brandy!” she cried in indignation.
“You needed it,” he asserted. “It will steady you, but you will not feel it. Compose yourself and we will look at the slate.”
She stood up beside him and he laid the slate open. There was writing on each leaf of it, on one side legible, on the other reversed.
“Oh,” she said and sat down heavily. He brought a small chair, set it beside hers and seated himself upon it, the slates open in his hands, before them both. Fine-lined, legible, plainly made by the point of the pencil, was the writing, on one leaf of the slates; on the other reversed writing with coarse strokes, plainly made by the splintered end, which was worn slightly at one place. All the writing was in the same individual script.
“This is not my handwriting,” said Vargas. “It is my husband's,” she gasped. The words on the slate were: “That which is buried in that coffin is alive. If disinterred it will die.” Vargas opened the other cabinet. The inside of its door was a mirror. Before this he held the slates. On the other leaf the broad-stroked script showed the same words.
“What does it mean?” she pleaded, “oh! what does it mean?”
“It doesn't mean anything,” said Vargas, roughly.
“How can that be,” she moaned. “It must mean something. It does mean something. I feel it does.”
“That is just the point,” he said, “that is what I feared before, and warned you of. Here are some chance words. They mean nothing, except that you or I or both of us have been intensely strung up with emotion. But if you cannot see that or be made to see that, you are lost. If you feel that they mean something, then they do mean that something to you, that that is your danger. Do not yield to it.”
“Do you mean to tell me, to try to convince me that those words, twice written, in the same handwriting, in my husband's hand of all hands, formed upon those slates while I held them myself, came there by accident?”
“Not by accident,” he argued. “By some operation of unguessed forces set in motion by your excitement or mine or both; but blind forces, meaningless as the voices in dreams.”
“Am I to believe meaningless,” she demanded, “the voices in my dreams that sent me to that advertisement and to you and told me expect an answer from the slates, a true answer?”
“Madame,” he reasoned, “the series of coincidences is startling, but it is nothing but a series of coincidences. Try to rise superior to it.”
“And you won't help me,” she wailed. “You won't tell me what this message means — ”
“I have told you my belief as to how it originated,” he said, “I have told you that I do not attach any other significance to it.”
“Oh,” she groaned, “I must go home.”
“Your carriage is at the door,” he said.
“My carriage!” she exclaimed. “How did it get there?”
“Not your own carriage,” he explained, “but one for you. I telephoned for it.”
“You have not left me an instant,” she asserted incredulously.
“When I brought you a glass of water I told the maid to telephone for a carriage and tell it to wait. It will be there.”
“I thank you,” she said, “and now, what do I owe you? What is your fee?” Vargas flushed all over his face and neck, a deep brownish-red.
“Mrs. Llewellyn,” he said with great dignity, “I take pay from my dupes for my fripperies of deception. But no money, not all the money on earth could pay me to do what I have done for you to-day, no sum could induce me to go through it again for anyone else. For you I would do anything. But what I have done was not done for payment, nor will anything I may do be done except for you, for whom I would do any service in my power.”
“I ask your pardon,” she said. “Where is the carriage? I shall faint if I stay here.”
Some weeks later, in the same room, the clairvoyant and the lady again faced each other.
“I had hoped never to see you again,” he said.
“Did you imagine that I could escape from the compulsion of all that series of manifestations?” she asked.
“I tried to believe that you might,” he answered.
“Have you been able to shake off its hold on you?” she demanded.
“Not entirely,” he confessed. “But dazing as the coincidences were, the effect on my emotions will wear off, like the smart of a burn; and, as one forgets the fury of past sufferings, I shall forget the turmoil of my feelings. There was no clear intelligibility, no definite significance in it at all.”
“Not in that message!” she exclaimed.
“Certainly not,” he asseverated.
“Yes there was,” she contradicted.
“Madame,” he said earnestly, “if you fancy you perceive any genuine coherence in those fortuitous words you have put the meaning there yourself, your imagination is riveting upon your soul fetters of your own forging.”
“My imagination and my soul have nothing to do with my insight into the spirit of that message,” she said calmly. “My heart cries out for help and my intellect has pondered at leisure upon what you call a fortuitous series of coincidences, a chance string of meaningless words. I see no incoherence, rather convincing coherence, in the sequence of your reading of horoscopes, my dreaming of dreams, leading up to the imperative behest given me from your slate.”
“Madame,” he cried, “this is heart-rending. I told you I dreaded the effect upon you of any sort of mummery.
