“What are you talking about, Gordon?” Miriam Palfrey leaned far back in her chair and her right hand, poised over the block of paper, began to dip and sway like a kite in high wind.

“I was telling Kate and John about old Hamish.”

“Oh, yes — we enjoyed old Hamish.” Miriam’s voice had become a faint monotone which sounded to Breton like an incredibly banal imitation of something from a Bela Lugosi film. Seeing the rapt attention on Kate’s face he decided to launch a full-scale attack in defense of common sense.

“So you enjoyed old Hamish,” he said in an unnaturally loud and cheerful voice. “What a picture that conjures up! I can see old Harnish slumped in a corner of his croft — an empty, dried-up husk, his purpose in life fulfilled — he has been enjoyed by the Palfreys.”

But Kate waved him to silence and Gordon Palfrey, who had been unfolding the velvet square, draped it over Miriam’s upturned face. Immediately, her plumply white hand took up the pen and began to fly across the paper, producing line after line of neat script. Gordon knelt beside the coffee table to steady the writing pad and Kate removed each top sheet as it was filled, handling them with a reverence that Breton found more annoying than any other aspect of the whole business. If his wife wanted to take an interest in so-called automatic writing, why could she not have been more rational about it? He would almost have been prepared to help her investigate the phenomenon himself had she not insisted on putting every sample in the general category of a Message From the Other Side.