Surprised, I asked what change she wished, and was told to take out everything relating to her banishment from Mansfield’s life, because she preferred to tell him that in her own way. “Shall I show him the record at all?” I asked. “Yes, but take that out first.” Fortunately, the record is kept in a loose-leaf, typewritten book, so this was not difficult. As the day wore on I grew more and more nervous. Suppose he should be more hurt than helped? Suppose we should fail? Rarely in my life have I dreaded anything so much, or felt so little confidence in anything I had deliberately undertaken to do. By nine o’clock I was in a nervous chill. Meanwhile Mr. Kendal telephoned that he had found my letters, which had been returned to his club, and that he would join us presently. Upon his arrival he told us that he had been one of the early members of the Society for Psychical Research in this country, and had spent several years investigating phenomena of this nature, together with various other young men, under the general supervision of Prof. William James, Dr. Minot Savage, and others of that group. He mentioned some of the frauds and self-deceptions uncovered at that time, but said he believed the ultimate conclusion to have been that there were certain well-authenticated phenomena for which no logical or scientific explanation had been found. Nothing that he said, however, indicated to the slightest degree his attitude toward the question in hand, and I received an impression that his mood was critical, which steadied me. The disappointment, should we fail, would be less hideous. In the end, he suggested a trial, and after preparing the table, Cass left us alone. The pencil started almost immediately, with a strange, jerkily rhythmical movement—due possibly to Mary’s agitation, possibly to mine, but wrote very distinctly, without pause or faltering. It was evident at once that the message conveyed more to him than its words suggested. Much later in the evening he told me that for some time after Mary left him he had believed that if she still existed anywhere in the universe she would contrive somehow to let him know; but as months had passed into years, with no sign from her, while never entirely losing faith in the continued integrity of the individual after death, his despair had deepened with his growing conviction that “the drop that was Mary” had been swept on in the stream and forever lost to him. Widely read in philosophies and unable to forget them, steeped—despite his practical occupation—in scientific and intellectual theory, he had feared to rely upon a reunion in a future of which no proof had been given him, lest he be grounding his faith in the sands of his own hope.