For some time afterwards nothing occurred, the figures had disappeared, the voices ceased, and I thought the _séance_ was over. Presently, however, I felt a hand laid on my head and the fingers began to gently stroke and pull the short curls upon my forehead. I whispered, "Who is this?" and the answer came back, "Don't you know me? I am Powles! At last--at last--after a silence of ten years I see you and speak with you again, face to face." "How can I tell this is _your_ hand?" I said. "Peter might be materializing a hand in order to deceive me." The hand immediately left my head and the _back_ of it passed over my mouth, when I felt it was covered with short hair. I then remembered how hairy John Powles' hands had become from exposure to the Indian sun whilst shooting, and how I had nicknamed him "Esau" in consequence. I recollected also that he had dislocated the left wrist with a cricket ball. "Let me feel your wrist," I said, and my hand was at once placed on the enlarged bone. "I want to trace your hand to where it springs from," I next suggested; and on receiving permission I felt from the fingers and wrist to the elbow and shoulder, where it terminated _in the middle of Miss Showers' back_. Still I was not quite satisfied, for I used to find it very hard to believe in the identity of a person I had cared for. I was so terribly afraid of being deceived. "I want to see your face," I continued. "I cannot show you my face to-night," the voice replied, "but you shall feel it;" and the face, with beard and moustaches, was laid for a moment against my own. Then the hand was replaced on my hair, and whilst it kept on pulling and stroking my curls, John Powles' own voice spoke to me of everything that had occurred of importance when he and I were friends on earth. Fancy, two people who were intimately associated for years, meeting alone after a long and painful separation, think of all the private things they would talk about together, and you will understand why I cannot write down the conversation that took place between us that night here. In order to convince me of his identity, John Powles spoke of all the troubles I had passed through and was then enduring--he mentioned scenes, both sad and merry, which we had witnessed together; he recalled incidents which had slipped my memory, and named places and people known only to ourselves. Had I been a disbeliever in Spiritualism, that night must have made a convert of me. Whilst the voice, in the well-remembered tones of my old friend, was speaking, and his hand wandered through my hair, Miss Showers continued to sleep, or to appear to sleep, with her back towards me, and her hands sewn into her nightdress sleeves, and the sleeves sewn down to the bed. But had she been wide awake and with both hands free, she could not have spoken to me in John Powles' unforgotten voice of things that had occurred when she was an infant and thousands of miles away.