matters, there are Unseen Powers who will amply avenge the profanation.
Know, then, that since my Beloved was snatched from me by what dull men
call death, all my faculties have been concentrated on the effort to
discover some link of communication with the Invisible World. I will not
dwell on my toils and sufferings, the terrible sights I have braved and
the sleepless nights that I have sacrificed to study. I do not grudge my
youth, passed as it were under the shadow of the tomb, for at last the
truth has been revealed to me. _You_ are to be the medium!"

"Oh, nonsense!" I shouted. "I won't undertake it! Nothing shall persuade
me! Besides, I am perfectly ignorant of the subject."

"You underrate your powers," observed Miss Latouche with calm
conviction. "Nature has endowed you with a most unusual organisation.
Your powers are quite involuntary. Nothing you say or do can make the
slightest difference. You are merely a passive agent for the
transmission of electric force."

"Do you mean a sort of telegraph wire?" I gasped, feebly.

"If you offer no resistance, all will be well with us," continued Miss
Latouche, ignoring the interruption; "but the Unseen Powers will bear no
trifling, and I can summon those to my aid who will make you bitterly
repent any levity!"

I hate those sort of vague prophecies. They frighten one quite out of
proportion to their real gravity.

"By the bye, I don't yet understand the reason you wouldn't tell my
fortune, as you seem to know such a lot about those things," I said at
last.

"What! You do not understand yet that there is a bond between us which
makes any concealment impossible? I could not blind _you_ with the
paltry fictions that satisfy those poor fools!" and she waved her hand
contemptuously towards the distant figures of the tennis players,
amongst whom Mr. Tucker, in a wonderful costume, was distinctly visible.
The expression struck me as unjustifiably strong, even when applied to a
man who sang comic songs with a banjo accompaniment.

"I don't think he is a bad little chap," I said, apologetically.

"They are all alike," she replied, with an air of ineffable scorn. "You
can only content them with idle promises of love and wealth, like the
ignorant village girl who crosses a gipsy's hand with silver and in
return is promised a rich husband. And all the while I see the dark
cloud hanging over them and can do nothing to avert it. Ah! it is
terrible to know the evil to come a