Three taps made answer.
The youth was stunned by the boldness and cleverness of all this. He was pained, too. He perceived no sign of abnormal thinking in his mother's action. She was not hysterical. She was not entranced. Whatever she did she did consciously—and the thought that she could deliberately deceive him was shocking. He breathed quickly and a nervous clutch came into his hands. He resented being fooled. "Let's try that again," he said; and his tone was precisely that of the child who sees a grown person swallow a coin and take it out of his ear. He was angry as well as sad. "Don't put your hand on it," he protested. "I don't like the looks of that."
She submitted, and then as he was putting it down on the table the sound of writing was heard within it. He laid his hand on the slates, and still the writing went on! With amazement he realized that both her hands were in sight and in no wise concerned in the writing. The right rested lightly and quietly on the frame of the slate, but the left, which lay on the opposite corner of the table, was quivering throughout all its minute muscles.
Amazed beyond words, excited, breathing deep, with a shudder of nervous excitement running over his entire body, Victor listened to the mystic pencil. "How do you work that?" he asked, in a whisper.
"I don't know. I have nothing to do with it," she answered; and taking the upper hinge of the slate between her fingers and thumb she slowly raised it.
And still the writing went on!
Victor, holding his breath in awe, bent to look within, but as the opening grew wider the writing stopped.
He snatched the slates from the table and studied the lines, which were made up of minute dots. It was all perfectly legible: "Son. I doubted. Now I know."
Victor sank back into his seat and stared speechlessly at the slate and the table. The problem of his mother's mediumship had taken on new elements of mystery. This physical test brought it into the range of his knowledge and interest. It was no longer a question of her honesty or sanity, it had become a problem in dynamics.
How was that bit of pencil moved? The messages he ignored—they didn't matter—but the method of their production seemed to eliminate all trickery, conscious or unconscious. Why did his mother's left hand quiver—and how could that writing shape itself?