A year later I had a most unpleasant experience of being made to feel seriously ill when I came down for a night from town, and as another clairvoyant assured me that this resulted from the message remaining undelivered and the poor old man's frantic endeavours to reach his wife's consciousness, I told my Wimbledon friend that something must be done. Either she must procure the lady's address "coûte que coûte," or I could not come down again to Wimbledon until this step had been taken.
Under pressure of this determination of mine the address was procured, and this led to a rather unpleasant experience.
I wrote a very courteous letter to the lady, enclosing the message, and explaining that I was quite debarred from visiting my Wimbledon friend until it was delivered, that I hoped, therefore, she would excuse my sending it, after more than a year's consideration of the question. I further intimated that although she might consider me a lunatic for my pains, I trusted there could be nothing to vex or hurt her in so touching an evidence of her husband's constant care and love, however little faith she might be disposed to place in the source from which the message was supposed to emanate.
The answer came as a shower bath on my unfortunate head.
The old lady (?) was furious. She had never heard of such wicked nonsense! "Her dear husband was quite the gentleman, both in clothes and appearance, and he was not old—not a day over sixty-eight—when he died," etc. etc.
It would have been amusing if it had not been rather pitiful to think of the poor "young" man of sixty-eight trying so hard to reach such a termagant!
Later, I heard that the military man, through whom the old lady's address had been given to my Wimbledon hostess, had asked the husband of the latter if I were a lunatic, by any chance!
And this is how some of us welcome our friends from the other side of the veil! The marvel to me is that Love can still be stronger than Death, in face of such ingratitude and stupidity!
I have already mentioned my extreme sensitiveness to the atmosphere (psychic) of rooms, especially rooms where one sleeps. I find another instance of this in my notes.
I was paying a first visit to a friend in the south of England, and a very bright, cheerful room had been allotted to me there.