“Not all of it. She will explain. I am just Mary K.’s tatl ... to ... tr ... tried ... trained substitute.”

Asked how he could be her substitute, when admittedly not of her purpose, he said: “Healing is her purpose and mine, and truth the best guard.”

At this time, the Farrow mystery was still unsolved. Not until after this second prolonged experience was I given any explanation of these attacks by opposing forces, or of the conditions governing such struggles, and while I was less disquieted than upon the first occasion, I was still puzzled and uneasy, strongly suspecting interference of some kind.

That afternoon, Mrs. Gaylord and one of her daughters, passing through the city, came in for a brief talk with Frederick, and while there was at first some interference, he was soon writing with his customary clarity and vigor.

When his sister asked about a personality aggressively demanding utterance through her pencil, he said: “Not much! Don’t give in to him.... Don’t you let anybody you don’t know tell you anything. It may be true and it may not, and it’s not a game to play any more blindfolded than you have to be. You have to take a good deal on faith, at best. Identify anybody who comes, as far as possible.”

“Can you tell me from whom that ‘letter’ came?” I asked.

“That letter got deteriorated in transmission. It short-circuited, so to speak, and was somewhat damaged. The next, we hope, will be better.”

After my friends’ departure, I caught Mary K. briefly, when she told me the source of the letter she had tried to deliver, adding that it had been too much interrupted. “Other forces tried to intervene and dominated you temporarily,” she said, after which the pencil wrote only “Ma ... Ma ... Ma....” sometimes surrounding the letters with two reversed circles. I suggested Maynard, but the answer was, “No ... Ma ... Ma ... Matt....”

“I am not a disintegrating force,” was the reply to my accusation. “I am Mary K....”