Mrs. Llewellyn was past articulation, but she shook her head. “I passed into a real trance, a real trance,” he babbled. She could only cling to the slate and gaze. “I had a frightful dream,” Vargas panted, “I dreamed there was a message on the plate. It frightened me, but what it was has escaped me.” “There is a message on the slate,” she managed to utter, “I heard the pencil writing.” Vargas, holding to the back of his chair, assisted himself to his feet. From her fingers, mechanically clenched on it, he gently disengaged the slate and put it on the table. Opening one of the cabinets he took out a decanter and two glasses, half filling one he placed it in her numb grasp. “Drink that,” he dictated, draining the other full glass as he spoke. Half dazed she obeyed him. Her face flushed angrily and the glass broke as she set it down. “You have given me brandy!” she cried in indignation. “You needed it,” he asserted. “It will steady you, but you will not feel it. Compose yourself and we will look at the slate.” She stood up beside him and he laid the slate open. There was writing on each leaf of it, on one side legible, on the other reversed. “Oh,” she said and sat down heavily. He brought a small chair, set it beside hers and seated himself upon it, the slates open in his hands, before them both. Fine-lined, legible, plainly made by the point of the pencil, was the writing, on one leaf of the slates; on the other reversed writing with coarse strokes, plainly made by the splintered end, which was worn slightly at one place. All the writing was in the same individual script. “This is not my handwriting,” said Vargas. “It is my husband’s,” she gasped. The words on the slate were: “That which is buried in that coffin is alive. If disinterred it will die.” Vargas opened the other cabinet. The inside of its door was a mirror. Before this he held the slates. On the other leaf the broad-stroked script showed the same words. “What does it mean?” she pleaded, “oh! what does it mean?” “It doesn’t mean anything,” said Vargas, roughly. “How can that be,” she moaned. “It must mean something. It does mean something. I feel it does.” “That is just the point,” he said, “that is what I feared before, and warned you of. Here are some chance words. They mean nothing, except that you or I or both of us have been intensely strung up with emotion. But if you cannot see that or be made to see that, you are lost. If you feel that they mean something, then they do mean that something to you, that that is your danger. Do not yield to it.” “Do you mean to tell me, to try to convince me that those words, twice written, in the same handwriting, in my husband’s hand of all hands, formed upon those slates while I held them myself, came there by accident?” “Not by accident,” he argued. “By some operation of unguessed forces set in motion by your excitement or mine or both; but blind forces, meaningless as the voices in dreams.”