y always seem to
me to indicate character very closely; and apart from this, I am
attracted by people who have well-shaped hands (not necessarily _small_
ones), and find it very difficult to ignore clumsy or ugly fingers,
which, unfortunately, never escape my notice.

Now the medium's hands were broad, short, and flabby, as I had had
plenty of opportunities of noting in the afternoon when he held my
wrist. The hands which grasped mine now were, on the contrary, well
made, small, and rather narrow, the true type of the American female
hand.

Mr Thompson had come up also to greet "Julia," and I whispered to him:

"Do ask Julia if there was not a mistake about her age this afternoon."

"No; you ask the question yourself, Miss Bates," he answered.

So I said rather eagerly: "Julia, do tell us, please, if there was not a
mistake this afternoon in your age--the answer was twenty-three. Is that
correct?"

A very emphatic shake of the head signifying "No" was the reply to this
last question, but no sounds proceeded from the lips.

Disappointed by this, I asked; "Can you not speak to us?"

She made a little gesture of rather helpless dissent; and Mrs Gray, who
stood by, explained that probably all her strength had gone to building
up the materialised body sufficiently to make it visible to us. Julia
bowed her head in assent to this, and then, still speechless, retired
once more behind the curtains.

I did not mention this appearance of Julia when writing to Mr Stead on
my return--I was so anxiously hoping that she might have tried to
impress the fact of having appeared to me, upon his consciousness, as a
test; but he said nothing about it in his first letters. So I let the
matter alone for a time, determining to tell him some day, but much
disappointed by the usual failure in getting corroborative evidence.

A week later, however, at the end of a long letter on other subjects, I
put this short P. S. in a casual way to him:

"Did Julia ever tell you that she had appeared to me in New York?"

In answering my letter he replied--also in a P. S.:

"By-the-by, to answer your last query--yes. Julia told me weeks ago that
she had appeared to you in New York, _but that she could not give you
her age on that occasion, because she was not accustomed to speaking
through the embodiment_."

Now in sending the list of questions and answers to Mr Stead I had
merely marked against the answer as to her age, "_twenty-three_," that