Professor Marshall’s eyes were fixed on his wife’s old cousin.  “Come in,” he said in a hoarse voice.  They were almost the first words Sylvia had heard him say.

Cousin Parnelia hastened up the path to the house.  Sylvia followed with her father, at the last extremity of agitation and perplexity.

When Cousin Parnelia reached the dining-room table, she sat down by it, pushed the cloth to one side, and produced a fresh sheet of yellow paper from her shabby bag.  “Put yourselves in a receptive frame of mind,” she said in a glib, professional manner.  Sylvia stiffened and tried to draw her father away, but he continued to stand by the table, staring at the blank sheet of paper with a strange, wild expression on his white face.  He did not take his eyes from the paper.  In a moment, he sat down suddenly, as though his knees had failed him.

There was a long silence, in which Sylvia could hear the roaring of the blood in her arteries.  Cousin Parnelia put one deeply veined, shrunken old hand on planchette and the other over her eyes and waited, her wrinkled, commonplace old face assuming a solemn expression of importance.  The clock ticked loudly.

Planchette began to write—­at first in meaningless flourishes, then with occasional words, and finally Sylvia saw streaming away from the pencil the usual loose, scrawling handwriting.  Several lines were written and then the pencil stopped abruptly.  Sylvia standing near her father heard his breathing grow loud and saw in a panic that the veins on his temples were swollen.

Cousin Parnelia took her hand off planchette, put on her spectacles, read over what had been written, and gave it to Professor Marshall.  Sylvia was in such a state of bewilderment that nothing her father could have done would have surprised her.  She half expected to see him dash the paper in the old woman’s face, half thought that any moment he would fall, choking with apoplexy.

What he did was to take the paper and try to hold it steadily enough to read.  But his hand shook terribly.

“I will read it to you,” said Cousin Parnelia, and she read aloud in her monotonous, illiterate voice:  “’I am well and happy, dearest Elliott, and never far from you.  When you call to me, I hear you.  All is not yet clear, but I wish I could tell you more of the whole meaning.  I am near you this moment.  I wish that—­’ The message stopped there,” explained Cousin Parnelia, laying down the paper.

Professor Marshall leaned over it, straining his eyes to the rude scrawls, passing his hand over his forehead as though to brush away a web.  He broke out in a loud, high voice.  “That is her handwriting....  Good God, her very handwriting—­the way she writes Elliott—­it is from her!” He snatched the paper up and took it to the window, stumbling over the chairs blindly as he went.  As he held it up to the light, poring over it again, he began to weep, crying out his wife’s name softly, the tears streaming down his unshaven cheeks.  He came back to the table, and sank down before it, still sobbing, still murmuring incessantly, “Oh, Barbara—­Barbara!” and laid his head on his outstretched arms.