left her right hand lying on
the pad just as it had been before.

Nothing happened. Her hand never moved; she was extremely conscious of
her own feelings and expectations.

She looked at the writing on the tablet once more. Yes, it was totally
and absolutely unlike her own. She tore off the sheet on which it was
written and folded it up and put it safely in her note-case. If she
was to drink her coffee, there was no more time for thought.

Hurriedly she left the crowded tea-rooms and started off in the
direction of her hospital.

It was well for her that she had to hurry, and that her thoughts for
the next few hours had to be given to the carrying-out of everyday
things. With practised mind-control she put the incident of the
"unseen hand" away from her as far as she could. When it came creeping
back again, like leaking water, into the foreground of her thoughts,
she fought it splendidly.

Freddy had so extremely disliked her dabbling, as he called it, in
occult matters, that for his sake, for his memory, she must not allow
herself to be mastered by it. She had scarcely ever allowed herself to
think even about her vision in the Valley for this very reason, and had
refused to be drawn into the wave of fortune-telling by palmistry and
by crystal-gazing and psychic sciences which the war had given birth to
in London. The nurses and the staff generally at the hospital spent a
great deal of time and money on palmists.

Margaret could honestly say to herself that no one had sought those
strange experiences less than she had, no one had been less interested
in Spiritualism and black magic, as it used to be called, than she had
been--and, indeed, still was. Michael had called her his practical
mystic, yet she had never felt herself to be one.

For Freddy's sake she would not encourage this new phase of the
super-mind which had suddenly come to her. He had considered
spiritualism a dangerous and undesirable study. With only his memory
to cling to, she would do nothing which would cause him any trouble.
Here again was the Lampton ancestor-worship developing to its fullest.

CHAPTER XX

When Margaret got back to her hospital, she found no time for psychic
reflections, for news had come that a fresh consignment of patients was
to arrive at the hospital the next morning, and as the number was
considerably more than they had expected, or the wards had beds for, it
meant that the staff, from the humblest t