The Countess gazed dreamily above his head.

“Your spiritual aura is clouded by troubled curnts, as it were.  I see you meetin’ a great loss, but you mus’ take heart, for a very powerful hand on the other side is guardin’ you night an’ day.  They tell me your initials is ‘B.B.’  You are employed somewheres in the daytime.  I see a big place with lots of other people employed there—­”

The Countess paused.  Bean waited in silence.

“Here”—­she came out of the clouds that menaced her sitter—­“take this pad an’ write a question on it.  Don’t lemme see it, mind!  When you got it all wrote out, fold it up tight an’ hold it against your forehead.  Never leggo of it, not once!”

Bean wrote, secretly, well below the table’s edge.

“Who was I in my last incarnation?”

He tore the small sheet from the pad, folded it tightly and, with elbows on the table, pressed it to his brow.  If the Countess answered that question, then indeed was she a seer.

She took up the pad from which he had torn the sheet.

“Concentrate,” she admonished him.  “Let the whole curnt of your magnetism flow into that question.  Excuse me!  I left the slate in the nex’ room.  My control will answer you on the slate.”

She withdrew between the curtains, but reappeared very soon.  Bean was concentrating.

“That’ll do,” said the Countess.  “Here!” She presented him with a double slate and a moist sponge.  “Wipe it clean.”

He washed the surfaces of the slate and the seer placed it upon the table between them, enclosing within its two sections a tiny fragment of slate pencil.  She placed her hands upon the slate and bade her sitter do likewise.

“You often hear skeptics say they is sometimes trickery in this,” said the Countess, “but say, listen now, how could it be?  I leave it to you, friend.  I ain’t seen your question; you held it a minute and then put it in your pocket.  An’ you seen the slate was clean.  Now concentrate; go into the Silence!”

Bean went into the Silence without suspicion, believing the Countess would fail.  She couldn’t know his question and no human power could write on the inside of that slate without detection.  He waited with sympathy for the woman who had overestimated her gifts.

Then he was startled by the faintest sound of scratching, as of a pencil on a slate.  It seemed to issue from beneath their hands at rest there in plain sight.  The medium closed her eyes.  Bean waited, his breath quickening.  Little nervous crinklings began at the roots of his hair and descended his spine—­that scratching, faint, yet vigorous, did it come from beyond the veil?

The scratching ceased.  The ensuing silence was portentous.

“Open it and look!” commanded the Countess.  And Bean forthwith opened it and looked a little way into his dead and dread past.  Apparently upon the very surface he had washed clean were words that seemed to have been hurriedly inscribed: