"That's plain. I never yet heard of a man who is dead and gone writing back letters to his friends. Who brings them? How do they come? Do they drop from the skies or come up through the graves?"
"Lawk a mercy!" cried Mrs. Macpherson, not catching the full import of the puzzling questions. "They come through the post."
Mrs. Copp was momentarily silenced. The answer was entirely practical: it was not given in anger; nor, as she confessed to herself, with any indication of insanity. Light dawned upon her mind.
"It's the spirits!" she exclaimed, coming to a sudden conviction. "Well! Before I'd go in for that fashionable rubbish! A woman of any pretension to sense believe in them!"
"Hang the spirits!" returned Mrs. Macpherson with offended emphasis. "I'm not quite such a fool as that. You should hear what the prefessor says of them. Leastways, not of the spirits, poor innocent things, which is all delusion, but of them there rapping mediums that make believe to call 'em up."
"Then, ma'am, if it's not the spirits you allude to as bringing the letters, perhaps you'll explain to me what does bring them."
"What should bring them but the post?"
Mrs. Copp was getting angry. "The post does not bring letters from dead men."
"I never said it did. Robert Hunter's not dead."
"Robert Hunter is."