For a few minutes nothing happened.  Chris started to speak, but she hushed him to silence.  The preliminary twitchings had appeared in her hand and arm.  Then the pencil began to write.  They read the message, word by word, as it was written: 

There is wisdom greater than the wisdom of reason.  Love proceeds not out of the dry-as-dust way of the mind.  Love is of the heart, and is beyond all reason, and logic, and philosophy.  Trust your own heart, my daughter.  And if your heart bids you have faith in your lover, then laugh at the mind and its cold wisdom, and obey your heart, and have faith in your lover.—­Martha.

“But that whole message is the dictate of your own heart,” Chris cried.  “Don’t you see, Lute?  The thought is your very own, and your subconscious mind has expressed it there on the paper.”

“But there is one thing I don’t see,” she objected.

“And that?”

“Is the handwriting.  Look at it.  It does not resemble mine at all.  It is mincing, it is old-fashioned, it is the old-fashioned feminine of a generation ago.”

“But you don’t mean to tell me that you really believe that this is a message from the dead?” he interrupted.

“I don’t know, Chris,” she wavered.  “I am sure I don’t know.”

“It is absurd!” he cried.  “These are cobwebs of fancy.  When one dies, he is dead.  He is dust.  He goes to the worms, as Martin says.  The dead?  I laugh at the dead.  They do not exist.  They are not.  I defy the powers of the grave, the men dead and dust and gone!

“And what have you to say to that?” he challenged, placing his hand on Planchette.

On the instant his hand began to write.  Both were startled by the suddenness of it.  The message was brief: 

Beware!  Beware!  Beware!

He was distinctly sobered, but he laughed.  “It is like a miracle play.  Death we have, speaking to us from the grave.  But Good Deeds, where art thou?  And Kindred? and Joy? and Household Goods? and Friendship? and all the goodly company?”

But Lute did not share his bravado.  Her fright showed itself in her face.  She laid her trembling hand on his arm.

“Oh, Chris, let us stop.  I am sorry we began it.  Let us leave the quiet dead to their rest.  It is wrong.  It must be wrong.  I confess I am affected by it.  I cannot help it.  As my body is trembling, so is my soul.  This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the mould of a generation to protect me from you.  There is reason in it.  There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me.  Were my father alive, he would protect me from you.  Dead, he still strives to protect me.  His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!”

“Do be calm,” Chris said soothingly.  “Listen to me.  It is all a lark.  We are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena which science has not yet explained, that is all.  Psychology is so young a science.  The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might say.  It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated.  This is simply unexplained phenomena.  But that is no reason that we should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism.  As yet we do not know, that is all.  As for Planchette—­”