He abruptly ceased, for at that moment, to enforce his remark, he had placed his hand on Planchette, and at that moment his hand had been seized, as by a paroxysm, and sent dashing, willy-nilly, across the paper, writing as the hand of an angry person would write.

“No, I don’t care for any more of it,” Lute said, when the message was completed.  “It is like witnessing a fight between you and my father in the flesh.  There is the savor in it of struggle and blows.”

She pointed out a sentence that read:  “You cannot escape me nor the just punishment that is yours!”

“Perhaps I visualize too vividly for my own comfort, for I can see his hands at your throat.  I know that he is, as you say, dead and dust, but for all that, I can see him as a man that is alive and walks the earth; I see the anger in his face, the anger and the vengeance, and I see it all directed against you.”

She crumpled up the scrawled sheets of paper, and put Planchette away.

“We won’t bother with it any more,” Chris said.  “I didn’t think it would affect you so strongly.  But it’s all subjective, I’m sure, with possibly a bit of suggestion thrown in—­that and nothing more.  And the whole strain of our situation has made conditions unusually favorable for striking phenomena.”

“And about our situation,” Lute said, as they went slowly up the path they had run down.  “What we are to do, I don’t know.  Are we to go on, as we have gone on?  What is best?  Have you thought of anything?”

He debated for a few steps.  “I have thought of telling your uncle and aunt.”

“What you couldn’t tell me?” she asked quickly.

“No,” he answered slowly; “but just as much as I have told you.  I have no right to tell them more than I have told you.”

This time it was she that debated.  “No, don’t tell them,” she said finally.  “They wouldn’t understand.  I don’t understand, for that matter, but I have faith in you, and in the nature of things they are not capable of this same implicit faith.  You raise up before me a mystery that prevents our marriage, and I believe you; but they could not believe you without doubts arising as to the wrong and ill-nature of the mystery.  Besides, it would but make their anxieties greater.”

“I should go away, I know I should go away,” he said, half under his breath.  “And I can.  I am no weakling.  Because I have failed to remain away once, is no reason that I shall fail again.”

She caught her breath with a quick gasp.  “It is like a bereavement to hear you speak of going away and remaining away.  I should never see you again.  It is too terrible.  And do not reproach yourself for weakness.  It is I who am to blame.  It is I who prevented you from remaining away before, I know.  I wanted you so.  I want you so.

“There is nothing to be done, Chris, nothing to be done but to go on with it and let it work itself out somehow.  That is one thing we are sure of:  it will work out somehow.”