and all
the goodly company?"

But Lute did not share his bravado. Her fright showed itself in her
face. She laid her trembling hand on his arm.

"Oh, Chris, let us stop. I am sorry we began it. Let us leave the
quiet dead to their rest. It is wrong. It must be wrong. I confess I
am affected by it. I cannot help it. As my body is trembling, so is
my soul. This speech of the grave, this dead man reaching out from the
mould of a generation to protect me from you. There is reason in it.
There is the living mystery that prevents you from marrying me. Were my
father alive, he would protect me from you. Dead, he still strives to
protect me. His hands, his ghostly hands, are against your life!"

"Do be calm," Chris said soothingly. "Listen to me. It is all a lark. We
are playing with the subjective forces of our own being, with phenomena
which science has not yet explained, that is all. Psychology is so young
a science. The subconscious mind has just been discovered, one might
say. It is all mystery as yet; the laws of it are yet to be formulated.
This is simply unexplained phenomena. But that is no reason that we
should immediately account for it by labelling it spiritism. As yet we
do not know, that is all. As for Planchette--"

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 conditi