Jessie paused a moment again. She hated the subject, she hated the idea of Archie's being concerned in these dim avenues to the unseen. She had, for herself, a perfectly unreasoning and childlike faith that there was this world, and the next world, and that God reigned supreme over both. But somehow it offended this instinctive attitude that the next world, and those who had gone there, should be mixed up with this world. They were not dead; she did not think they had ceased to exist; but they had done with this world, and it was something like a profanity to meddle with them. But then Archie had not meddled, as he most truly said: they seemed to have meddled with him. Their meddling had stopped altogether for a dozen years, and here on this half-sheet of paper was the evidence that something of the sort had begun again. "I thought you had dropped all interest in it," she said. "I thought it was all finished, like a childish fairy-story, like the Abracadabra legend Cousin Marion told me about. Oh, there's tea; shall we have tea?" Pasqualino had spread their table underneath the stone-pine, and she hailed this as a possible dismissal of the whole affair. She did not want to talk any more about it, and, if below her silence there should lurk a fear, she preferred to cover it up, not examine it. Archie got up. "Certainly let us have tea," he said. "Perhaps your mind will be clearer after tea. I'm not going to quit the question, Jessie. The historian is at his histories, and we shall be alone, you and I, and I want to talk it out. Something has happened, you see, this afternoon. Martin--or somebody--has written again. You were quite right to imagine that for me the whole thing was finished, had become an Abracadabra-myth as you said. As far as normal life goes, I thought it had too. But I always knew that it might come back. And it has come back without my asking for it, though it--he--says he's going to leave me alone. But, after all, he says, 'You've got to do your best and your highest.' Now I ask you, as a reasonable female, does that look like a message from a devil? No, it's Martin all right, bless him. But let's have tea." They moved across into the shadow of the pine, where the table sparkled with the specks of stray sunshine that filtered through the boughs. And Jessie, sane and normal, held on to those evidences of the kindly ordinary human life, as an anchor to prevent her drifting out into perilous seas. But to Archie no seas were perilous: they might engulf his body and drown him, and, as it seemed to him, they might engulf his spirit, but they were not perilous in his view. They were just the sea, the great encompassing presence...