Toward the end of the evening, when Mrs. Gaylord had suggested going back to her hotel, the pencil made a little circle and some apparently aimless marks inside it.
“Is this Frederick?” I asked, wondering at indecision from him.
“Yes. I want to do something Mother can’t forget.... You don’t need any more fancy stunts, do you?”
She said she did not, but that she was very tired and could stay no longer.
“Oh, don’t go!” he begged. “I’ll go with you, but I like gassing this way.” Another characteristic phrase, she said.
After some further assurances of his frequent presence and constant watchfulness, she said she really must go. Frederick then moved the pencil down to the right corner again, and wrote, very clearly and carefully, one more “upside-down” message—a touching little message of love to “dear Dad and the girls,” which he signed, “Your boy, Frederick.”
The next day Mrs. Gaylord went home, where she immediately destroyed all her black-bordered cards and stationery and similar symbols of mourning. She wrote me that she felt it was false and wicked to mourn for a son as vitally alive and happy as she now knew Frederick to be.