h 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