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of Celtic blood—declared that she was a muse. (She rather resented this.)
    She told her sister about Arthur, in a letter. Her sister told their mother, who sent a letter, in a scarcely legible hand, warning her of terrible consequences if she didn’t repent and leave London at once. Hell-fire and damnation and et cetera; but she was always saying that sort of thing.
    “I wouldn’t worry about hell-fire,” said her friend Mrs Sedgley, who had modern views, and believed in the Spirit World, but not in Hell.
    They sat in Mrs Sedgley’s parlour, in the big empty house in Kensington she had once occupied with her late husband. Rain pattered on the windows, and Mrs Sedgley’s cat Gautama rubbed curiously against Josephine’s leg.
    “Though a touch of caution might, perhaps, if you don’t mind my saying—”
    “I have always preserved my independence, Esther.”
    “Of course.”
    “Esther,” Josephine said. “Do you believe that two people can … well, that they can share certain thoughts, or dreams, or…” She fell silent, and to cover her sudden embarrassment she reached down to scratch Gautama’s ears.
    “Am I to understand,” Mrs Sedgley said, carefully pouring more tea, “that you and the young man—Arthur—have experienced such a … phenomenon?”
    “I don’t mean it in a vulgar sense—that is, a literal sense.”
    “Certainly not.”
    “What-colour-am-I-thinking-of, what-card-am-I-holding, and so forth. But rather…”
    “In a spiritual sense.”
    “Yes. Well—yes.”
    She was in the habit—Mrs Sedgley had introduced her to it—of keeping a journal of her dreams, at least in so far as they had poetic or spiritual significance. Since the night of the storm, she and Arthur had both been visited by dreams of stars, rushing water, roses, and distant mountains—though not always on the same nights—and Josephine had woken on several mornings with ideas for detective stories.
    “I don’t know.” She sighed. “I shouldn’t like you to think I’m being foolish.”
    “Oh, my dear—never!”
    They listened to the rain for a moment.
    “Certainly”—Mrs Sedgley sipped her tea—“there may be such a thing.” She sounded a little sceptical. “Between two sensitive souls, who knows what might be possible? I remember when Thomas and I were young.… What does the young man think?”
    “Telepathy, he says, or thought-transference.”
    “Hmm. He’s … educated in these matters?”
    “Not at all. Not until a few weeks ago. But he’s taken an interest now. As soon as they reopened the Reading Room he began studying the journals—the Proceedings of the Society for Psychical Research and so on. It’s rather flattering.”
    In a matter of weeks he’d become conversant in the lingo of psychical research, and could happily discuss—scratching his head, puzzled, as if hoping that some rearrangement of the terms might spell out the answer to a question he could not quite define—such arcane subjects as telepathy , and telekinesis, and hyperpromethia (which referred to a supernatural power of foresight), and psychorrhagy (which referred to the breaking free of the soul from the confines of the body).
    “A scholar,” Mrs Sedgley said.
    “He writes detective stories.”
    “Oh? Does he have a good income?”
    She had to admit that he did not, and that it was a source of some concern. The prospect of a literary sort of marriage rather appealed to her; poverty did not; yet the two seemed inextricable from each other.
    Mrs Sedgley frowned.
    “Is he…” Mrs Sedgley sought with difficulty for the right word. She liked to consider herself forward-thinking and somewhat bohemian, and was reluctant to utter such a conventional thought. “Is he a solid sort of person?”
    “Oh, my dear—yes. I can’t quite explain it, but I feel he is the most solid person I’ve ever met; as if nothing else since I came to London has been quite real.”
    “I see.” Gautama jumped up into Mrs