and planchette writers, who have often strangely illumined the dark places of life for me.  To those who mock and doubt, I merely say, ‘try.’  Or else I cite, not ‘Raymond’ nor Conan Doyle, but that strange, interesting, scientific book by a Belfast professor, who made experiments in weighing the tables before and after they levitated, and weighing the mediums, and finding them all lighter.  I think that was it; anyhow it is all, to any open mind, entirely convincing that something had occurred out of the normal, which is what Percy and the twins never will believe.  When I say ‘try’ to Percy, he only answers, ’I should fail, my dear.  I may, as I have been called, be a superman, but I am not a superwoman, and cannot call up spirits.’  And the children are hopeless about it, too.  Frank says we are not intended to ‘lift the curtain’ (that is what he calls it).  He is such a thorough clergyman, and never had my imagination; he calls my explorations ‘dabbling in the occult.’  His wife jeers, and asks me if I’ve been talking to many spooks lately.  But then her family are hard-headed business people, quite different from me.  Clare says the whole thing frightens her to death.  For her part she is content with what the Church allows of spiritual exploration, which is not much.  Clare, since what I am afraid I must call her trouble, has been getting much Higher Church; incense and ritual seem to comfort her.  I know the phase; I went through it twenty years ago, when my baby Michael died and the world seemed at an end.  But I came out the other side; it couldn’t last for me, I had to have much more.  Clare may remain content with it; she has not got my perhaps too intense instinct for groping always after further light.  And I am thankful that she should find comfort and help anywhere.  Only I rather hope she will never join the Roman Church; its banks are too narrow to hold the brimming river of the human spirit—­even my Clare’s, which does not, perhaps, brim very high, dear, simple child that she is.

As for the twins, they are merely cynical about all experiments with the supernatural.  I often feel that if my little Michael had lived....  But, in a way, I am thankful to have him on the other side, reaching his baby hands across to me in the way he so often does.

That night I determined I would make a great effort to bring Jane into the circle of light, as I love to call it.  She would find such comfort there, if only it could be.  But I knew it would be difficult; Jane is so hard-headed, and, for all her cleverness in writing, has so little imagination really.  She said that Raymond made her sick.  And she wouldn’t look at Rupert Lives! or Across the Stream, E.F.  Benson’s latest novel about the other side.  She quite frankly doesn’t believe there is another side.  I remember her saying to me once, in her school-girl slang, when she was seventeen or so, ’Well, I’d like to think I went on, mother; I think it’s