rous, heavy-lidded dark eyes swept him soothingly. Her
hair was a marvellously piled storm-cloud above a full, well-rounded
face. Her complexion was wonderful. One very plump, very white hand
rested at the neck of the flowing scarlet robe she wore. A moment she
posed thus, beyond doubt a being capable of expounding all wingy
mysteries of any soul whatsoever.

Then she became alert and voluble. She took his hat and placed it in the
hall, seated him before the table at the room's centre and sat
confronting him from the other side. She filled her chair. It could be
seen that she was no slave to tight lacing.

Although foreign in appearance, the Countess spoke with a singularly
pure and homelike American accent. It was the speech he was accustomed
to hear in Chicago. It reassured him.

The Countess searched his face with those wonderful eyes.

"You are intensely psychic," she announced.

Bean was aware of this. Every medium he had ever consulted had told him
so.

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 bet