their hands touching all round the table, for, if any one made a break, the consequences to the medium might be very serious, since the spirit had built itself up from material derived from the medium and the "electric fluid" contributed by the sitters. So, if the electric fluid was withdrawn the material would not be able to get back into the medium, who would completely collapse and possibly die, though whether Durward would thereupon again become a visible and permanent dweller on this planet was not explained. By this time Jessie had been so convinced of the wicked and profane fraudulence of all these proceedings that she furtively withdrew one of her hands, and thus cut off the electric fluid altogether. But Durward didn't mind a bit, but continued to tell them about the joys of Paradise, which, according to his account, must have been like the Crystal Palace erected in the middle of the Botanical Gardens. And when he had regaled them enough he withdrew in the direction where the medium sat, took off his beard, and became Felisy with a veil and an alto voice. Surely all this was enough to make one despair and contemn the whole idea of intercourse with spirits... But Jessie suddenly became aware of a basic illogicality in her position. It was not intercourse with spirits she despised, but those despicable swindlers who, with the aid of false beards and musical-boxes, pretended that they could materialize and cause communication with spirits. She did not deride the memory of that afternoon because the spirits of Cardinal Newman and Durward and Felisy had moved among them, but because they hadn't. It was no use accounting for her repugnance towards genuine intercourse with spirits by her repugnance towards quacks and charlatans. The whole history of spiritualism teemed with these undesirable gentry and these faked phenomena, but they had no more connection with Archie and his communications from his brother than had a forged bank-note with the credit of the Bank of England. She found she did believe that the knowledge, say, of the cache beneath the pine-tree came to Archie from other than normal human sources. It was known to no living being in the world, so far as she could tell, and if she looked for an explanation she must search for it in the supposition that the knowledge came to him from a living intelligence beyond the veil. She intensely disliked being forced to that conclusion, and now she knew why. It was for the reason she had suggested to him this afternoon.