"It was a direct materialization," confessed Mrs. Joyce. "My own feeling
is that your grandfather sent it to assure us of your mother's return."
Victor silently confronted them, his anxiety lost in wonder. He had been
told spiritualists were an uneducated lot, and to have these cultured
and intelligent women calmly express their acceptance of a fact so
destructive of all the laws of matter as this folded note, blinded him.
He shifted the conversation. "Isn't it horrible that I should be here
without a dollar and without a single relative? I don't even know that I
have a relation in the world. My mother told me that she had a brother
somewhere in the West, but I don't think she ever gave me his address.
There must be aunts or uncles somewhere in the East, but I have never
heard from them. It seems as though she had kept me purposely ignorant
of her family. You've been very good and kind to me, Mrs. Joyce, but I
can't ask anything more of you. I can't ask you to stay here in this
gloomy little hole. Please go home. I'll fight it out here some way
alone."
"My dear boy," said Mrs. Joyce, "I insist on staying. I cannot leave
Lucy in her present condition, and I refuse to leave you alone. She is
coming back to you soon, and then we will plan for the future. As for
the message, you will do well to take its word to heart. It is plainly a
warning that you must not leave the city."
"But, Mrs. Joyce, think what it involves to believe that that letter
dropped out of the air!"
"The world has grown very vast and very mysterious to me," she solemnly
responded. "I've had even more wonderful things than that take place in
my own home."
Mrs. Joyce saw that to go would be best, at least for the time, and
together she and Leo went down the stairway and out into the street,
leaving the stubborn youth to confront his problem alone with the
phlegmatic Mrs. Post.