When the cards had been put away, Mère Gontran produced the _planchette_ and set it upon a small table covered in red baize round the binding of which hung numerous little woolen pompons. "Now we shall find out something about your friends in England," she announced, cheerfully. Sylvia had not the heart to disappoint Mère Gontran, and she placed her hands upon the heart-shaped board, which trembled so much under Mère Gontran's eager touch that the pencil affixed made small squiggles upon the paper beneath. The _planchette_ went on fidgeting more and more under their four hands like a restless animal trying to escape, and from time to time it would skate right across the paper, leaving a long penciled trail in its path, which Mère Gontran would examine with great intentness. "It looks a little bit like a Y," she would say. "A very little bit," Sylvia would think. "Or it may be an A. Never mind. It always begins rather doubtfully. I _won't_ lose my temper with it to-night." The _planchette_ might have been a tenderly loved child learning to write for the first time, by the way Mère Gontran encouraged it and tried to award a shape and purpose to its most amorphous tracks. When it had covered the sheet of paper with an impossibly complicated river-system, Mère Gontran fetched a clean sheet and told Sylvia severely that she must try not to urge the _planchette_. Any attempt at urging had a very bad effect on its willingness. "I didn't think I was urging it," said Sylvia, humbly. "Try and sit more still, dear. If you like, I'll put my feet on your toes and then you won't be so tempted to jig. We may have to sit all night, if we aren't careful." Sylvia strained every nerve to sit as still as possible in order to avoid having her toes imprisoned all night by Mère Gontran's feet, which were particularly large, even for so tall a woman. She concentrated upon preventing her hands from leading _planchette_ to trace the course of any more rivers toward the sea of baize, and after sitting for twenty minutes like this she felt that all the rest of her body had gone into her hands. She had never thought that her hands were small, but she had certainly never realized that they were as large and as ugly as they were; as for Mère Gontran's, they had for some time lost any likeness to hands and lay upon the _planchette_ like two uncooked chops. At last when Sylvia had reached the state of feeling like a large pincushion that was being rapidly pricked by thousands of pins, Mère Gontran murmured: "It's going to start." Immediately afterward the _planchette_ careered across the paper and wrote a sentence. "_Dick's picked a daisy,_" Mère Gontran read out. "Drat the thing! Never mind, we'll have one more try." Again a sentence was written, and again it repeated that Dick had picked a daisy. Suddenly Samuel the collie made an odd noise. "He's going to speak through Samuel," Mère Gontran declared. "What is it, dear? Tell me what it is?"