And for me he was always there: in that hot blink of premature summer he came down to bathe, and lay beside me on the beach; he swam with me to the rock of the cache; he sat with me at meals; one afternoon he came up to the top of Monte Gennaro, to pick the orchises of the spring and to say his Gloria for himself. There was no break at all in our companionship; indeed, it but seemed, as I have said, to have grown intenser and more vivid. And that which, when he lay dying, seemed quite impossible, namely, that I should come back to the island and the villa again now that I should not find him here, has become perfectly natural, since I shall most assuredly find him here. He will be with me in England, too, and wherever I may go during the period of my mortal days, I shall find him, not by any act of faith that the dead die not, nor by any theoretical conviction that his individuality survives, but from the plain experience that it is so.... And when the dimness and the dream of life vanish from my awakening vision, I know also that among the first who will give me welcome will be Francis, and his grey merry eyes will greet me....
I arrived back to a cold and snowy England towards the end of the month, and as soon as I got home unlocked the drawer in which I had placed on a certain day last January the two "posthumous packets," as Francis called them, which we had severally prepared. As the reader may remember, we had packed them to serve as a test concerning the possibility of spirit-communication, and in mine I had placed a "J" nib, a five-franc piece and some carbolic tooth-powder, and had written directions on it that it was to be sent to him to deal with in the event of my dying first. While I was doing this upstairs, he was making ready his packet in the sitting-room, and on my return gave it me wrapped up and bound with string and sealed. There in its drawer it had lain till to-day, and the time was now come when the test could be put. The box in which he had disposed a certain object or objects unknown to me was some six inches long, and about the same across.
I at once went to a friend who is much immersed in spiritualistic affairs, and asked him to arrange a sitting for me with some medium whom he believed to have power, and believed not to be fraudulent. (It did not really matter whether the medium was fraudulent or not, since no amount of trickery could discover the contents of that package.) I asked that my name should not be given, but that a sitting should be arranged on some appointed day. I begged him, finally, to come with me, so that between us we might get a fairly complete account of what occurred, and to be a witness. I may add that I was not at all sanguine as to anything occurring.
Accordingly a few days afterwards Jack Barrett arrived, and together we drove off to the medium's house. The packet that Francis had made still lay in the locked drawer of a black oak table, and I said no word to my friend either about Francis, whom he had known slightly, or about the packet.
The procedure was of the kind common to trance-mediums. We sat in a small front-room of a rather dingy house in a dull respectable street. The room was partially darkened by the drawing of curtains over the window, but there was a bright fire burning on the hearth, and a lamp turned low was placed for my friend and me on a small round table, so that we could see sufficiently to write without difficulty. The medium herself was a pleasant-looking woman, about thirty years of age, with a slight cockney accent and a quiet level voice. Before the sitting began she made us an explanation of her powers, which I will give for what it is worth. Since she was a child she had often gone off into queer trances, which she could induce at will. When she awoke from them, she never knew more than that she had been having very vivid dreams, and talking to unknown people, but all recollection of what had passed instantly faded from her memory. Subsequently she married and had one child, a girl, who died at the age of ten. But, going into a trance a day or so after her death, the mother was aware when she awoke that she had been talking to her child. Thereafter she cultivated her gift, getting her husband or a friend to sit with her when she was in trance, and listen to and take down what she said. When in trance she spoke in Daisy's voice, not in her own, and the dead child told her about its present state of existence. Daisy described other dead people whom she came across, and could transmit messages from them. Such was Mrs. Masters's account of her gift.
She asked me only one question, and that was whether I wanted to get into communication with a dead friend. I told her that this was so, and then quite suddenly found myself harbouring a strong distaste for all these proceedings. I should certainly have gone away and had no sitting at all, if I had not recollected my promise to Francis to go through with it. It seemed to me like taking some sacred thing into a place of ill-fame....
All that follows is a compilation from our joint notes, and I have inserted nothing which did not appear in the notes or in the recollection of both of us.