"Not in that way," Margaret said. She smiled a queer sort of smile, as her thoughts flew back to her work in the hut, the cleaning and sorting of delicate fragments and amulets which had been made and treasured by a people of whom the girl had probably never even heard, the mascots and art-treasures of a forgotten civilization, which had lasted for thousands of years.
Margaret paid for her coffee, and looked at the clock. She had only a few minutes in which to drink it. She poured in all the cream which she had ordered to cool it, but still it was too hot to drink. While she waited she wondered whether her hand would write anything else if she left it lying on her writing pad. Nervously she took up her pencil and while she tried to sip her coffee, she left her right hand lying on the pad just as it had been before.
Nothing happened. Her hand never moved; she was extremely conscious of her own feelings and expectations.
She looked at the writing on the tablet once more. Yes, it was totally and absolutely unlike her own. She tore off the sheet on which it was written and folded it up and put it safely in her note-case. If she was to drink her coffee, there was no more time for thought.
Hurriedly she left the crowded tea-rooms and started off in the direction of her hospital.
It was well for her that she had to hurry, and that her thoughts for the next few hours had to be given to the carrying-out of everyday things. With practised mind-control she put the incident of the "unseen hand" away from her as far as she could. When it came creeping back again, like leaking water, into the foreground of her thoughts, she fought it splendidly.
Freddy had so extremely disliked her dabbling, as he called it, in occult matters, that for his sake, for his memory, she must not allow herself to be mastered by it. She had scarcely ever allowed herself to think even about her vision in the Valley for this very reason, and had refused to be drawn into the wave of fortune-telling by palmistry and by crystal-gazing and psychic sciences which the war had given birth to in London. The nurses and the staff generally at the hospital spent a great deal of time and money on palmists.
Margaret could honestly say to herself that no one had sought those strange experiences less than she had, no one had been less interested in Spiritualism and black magic, as it used to be called, than she had been—and, indeed, still was. Michael had called her his practical mystic, yet she had never felt herself to be one.
For Freddy's sake she would not encourage this new phase of the super-mind which had suddenly come to her. He had considered spiritualism a dangerous and undesirable study. With only his memory to cling to, she would do nothing which would cause him any trouble. Here again was the Lampton ancestor-worship developing to its fullest.