It was three o’clock in the morning when Mr. Kendal left us to return to his club—but he went convinced. Like Mrs. Gaylord, his confidence was inspired not only by the temper and tenor of the messages he had received, but by the accompanying consciousness of a familiar personality, akin to the certainty of identity one feels in talking to a friend by telephone or in reading a characteristic letter. Like her, too, he said that in several instances his unspoken thought had been directly answered. The next day we resumed our conversation—for it amounted to that—with Mary. “There will be hours, and sometimes days, when you cannot feel me, just at first,” she warned him. “But I beg of you, do not let the doubts prevail. I shall be there, unless that disintegrating force drives me away. That’s a power we here cannot fight alone. Faith is not the desire to believe, as some men have said. It is the thread that connects your life and ours, and when it is broken we are powerless to reach you.” We spoke again of inaccuracies concerning mundane activities, and he elaborated somewhat his theory that it is unwise to ask and unsafe to rely upon answers about concrete, specific things, because in translating them into terms of our plane we are apt to overlook some transforming, unknown factor, and so go wrong. “Besides that,” Mary took up the discussion, “you must work out your problem yourself. We can only help you definitely and directly in the larger things that pertain to the life of our purpose. Your present problem may be solved in any of several ways, and will perhaps affect the ephemeral part of your life. Your greater concern, and my only concern, is with the fluid part, which we shall share together always, now.” He asked, after some further talk, whether there was danger of my being exploited or employed by malign influences—a suggestion entirely new to me—to which she replied in the negative, adding: “Trust us for that. Her own purpose is definite, and with that foundation, we can protect her fully.” Apparently she underestimated the strength of the enemy, or perhaps she merely disregarded the temporary confusion created by occasional sorties. Thinking that he might know something about New Albany, Indiana, I told him of the Annie Manning episode and my failure to ascertain her brother’s address. Our conversation was interrupted by an unsigned statement that the brother was not in New Albany, Indiana, but in Albany, New Hampshire, flatly contradicting a previous statement. My impatient comment was answered by an assurance that Annie Manning had recently passed to the next plane and was confused. A suggestion that possibly Annie Manning was one of the malign forces mentioned brought no response, unless Mary Kendal’s next words constituted an indirect reply. “Manzie dear, ... you will have entirely different forces working against you, from those trying to control Margaret, but we will truly and surely protect you both.”