“Might I ask some questions?” he said.
“You must sit quietly,” she answered, “and though I can never see so well after the first contact breaks, Martha may speak for you. Sit as you did, and wait for me.” Norcross walked at his nervous, hurried little pace back to his seat on the sofa. His face was quite controlled now, and his sharp eyes held all their native cunning. That grip on himself grew, as he waited for the inert seeress to speak again.
“Martha says, ‘I will try,’” she gave out finally. “Quick—with your question—with your lips, not your mind—I am not strong enough now.”
“What was Lallie’s real name?”
“Helen.”
“Her other name?”
A pause, then:
“Martha is silent. You are testing me. Tell something you want to know—even advice.”
“Was there ever anyone else?”
A pause again, then:
“Never. She loved you wholly. She was angry over a little thing, just jealousy, during that last quarrel. She had already forgiven. It was only a girl’s whim. Do you want advice?”
Norcross thrusted obliquely from the corner of his eye at Mrs. Markham and looked down at the floor.
“Ask her if I shall sell,” he said.
The answer came so suddenly that it overlapped the last words of his sentence.
“Martha says that she is going away.” No more for two silent minutes; no more until Mrs. Markham dropped her hand from her eyes, turned to Norcross, and said in a normal, sprightly tone:
“It is all over for this evening. I suppose the trouble lay in your last question. I am sorry—if you came here looking for business advice—that you got only the things of the affections. To your old love affairs, I had an unusually quick response to-night.” She leaned heavily back in her chair. “Excuse me if I seem tired. There is a kind of inner strain about this which you cannot know—a strain at the core. It does not affect the surface, but it makes you languid.” Yet her manner, as she threw herself back, invited him to linger.
“I shall not ask you,” she went on, “whether the things I told you to-night are true. We all have our human vanities in our work; we like to hear it praised. That is one reason why I do not ask. Then I know without your confirmation that what I told you was true. When the control comes as clearly and strongly as it did for a few minutes tonight,—before you interrupted by rising—the revelations are always accurate and true. The details I gave you are trivial. That is generally a feature of a first sitting. The scholars have found an explanation of that phenomenon, and I am inclined to agree with them. If I were talking to you over a telephone and you were not sure of my voice, how should I identify myself? By some trivial incident of our common experience. For example, suppose I were to call you up to-morrow. How should I identify myself? Somewhat like this, probably: ’You tried to turn the gas out completely, when I wanted it only lowered in order to save my eyes.’ Wouldn’t that identify me to you?” she paused as for an answer.