"The table" began with a D, and then successively E, H, A, V were given. No one ever heard of a Polish or Hungarian name of the kind, and I remember saying petulantly: "Oh, give it up, Morton. It's all nonsense! Nobody ever heard of a Mr Dehav."
Once more Morton rescued a really good bit of evidence by his imperturbable perseverance.
"Wait a bit! Let us see what is coming," he said.
I took no further personal interest in the experiment. Either Morton concluded the name was finished, or there was some confusion in getting the next letters, owing doubtless to my impetuous disgust. Anyway, he went on to say:
"Let us ask where the fellow lives at the present time." This was instantly answered by "Freshwater," and the further information given that he was a widower.
None of us knew any man, married or single, who lived at Freshwater, and the incident was relegated to the limbo of failures.
Several years later, however, my friend did marry a gentleman whose name (a very pretty one) began with the five despised letters, and he was a widower, and had been living in his own house at Freshwater at the time mentioned. She did not meet him until some years after our curious experience.
About the same time, but in the south of England, my attention was again drawn to metapsychics by an experience connected with the death of the famous Marquis of Hastings, of horse-racing repute. As a young girl I lived close to the Mote Park at Maidstone, where his sister, the present Lady Romney, was then living as Lady Constance Marsham. The Reverend David Dale Stewart and his wife (he was Vicar of Maidstone, and I made my home with them for some years after leaving school) were friends of hers, and she sometimes came to see them in a friendly way in the morning. On one of these occasions, when Lady Constance had just returned from paying her brother a visit in a small shooting-box in the eastern counties (I think), Mrs Stewart remarked that she was afraid the change had not done Lady Constance much good, as she was looking far from well. In those days Lady Romney was an exceptionally strong and healthy young woman.
She said rather impatiently: "Well, the fact is I did a very stupid thing the other day—I never did such a thing before—I fainted dead away for the first time in my life."
Asked for the reason of this, she told us that she and her husband and Lord and Lady Hastings were dining quietly one evening together, two guests who had been expected not having arrived by the train specified.