"Then my experience goes for nothing," I answered. "It was a living woman, not an excarnate one, who came to my bedside on the 4th July."
Later, when the Embassy was relieved, and this lady (who had presented such a "stiff upper lip" to Fortune) was once more safe at home for a much-needed rest, I found that she had gone through a special time of accentuated suffering just when I felt her presence in my room. Her husband was down with dysentery, and she had not enough food either for him or for her poor little children, and the strain was almost too great, even for that brave soul.
Of course, she had been quite unconscious of any appeal to me.
But she has Scottish as well as Irish blood in her veins, and this heredity may have enabled her subconscious self to sense my locality and to realise my power and will to help her in her desperate need.
Truly it was a case of "vain is the help of man," or woman either! But we know too little of spiritual laws to be able to deny off-hand the efficacy of any earnest prayer.
I saw Mr Myers make a note of the circumstance, but, unfortunately, this cannot be found amongst his papers. I asked Mrs Myers about it, and she remembered distinctly her husband having mentioned the case to her when he returned home after that meeting, but when I last saw her, she had hunted amongst his papers in vain for the note which he made at the time.
Early in January 1901, the day after Lord Robert's triumphant procession through London, I went to spend some weeks at an "open-air cure" in Devonshire, high up in the hills, and in a bleak part of the county. Several severe illnesses had left me so supersensitive to colds and draughts that it seemed a vital necessity to take some such drastic step, even at this inclement time of the year, unless I were prepared to sink into a state of chronic invalidism, and become a burden to myself and my neighbours for the rest of my natural life.
An old friend was "second in command" in this special establishment, which she had asked me to recommend, and a bright thought struck me that I might do my friend a good turn, and myself also, by spending a few weeks in the house.
I did not bargain, however, for the deep snow which fell on the very day after my arrival, nor for the howling west winds, which continued to blow during the whole of my stay.