"You know perfectly well that I dislike having the beds disturbed until nine o'clock, Maggie."
"I'm going out."
"You said that last night, but you didn't go."
Silence.
"Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of—" I hesitated—"of fear. When you have really seen or heard something, it will be time enough to be nervous."
"Humph!" said Maggie on one of these occasions, and edged into the room. It was growing dusk. "It will be too late then, Miss Agnes. And another thing. You're a brave woman. I don't know as I've seen a braver. But I notice you keep away from the telephone after dark."
The general outcome of these conversations was that, to avoid argument, I permitted the preparation of my room for the night at an earlier and yet earlier hour, until at last it was done the moment I was dressed for dinner.
It is clear to me now that two entirely different sorts of fear actuated us. For by that time I had to acknowledge that there was fear in the house. Even Delia, the cook, had absorbed some of Maggie's terror; possibly traceable to some early impressions of death which connected them-selves with a four-post bedstead.
Of the two sorts of fear, Delia's and Maggie's symptoms were subjective. Mine, I still feel, were objective.
It was not long before the beginning of August, and during a lull in the telephone matter, that I began to suspect that the house was being visited at night.
There was nothing I could point to with any certainty as having been disturbed at first. It was a matter of a book misplaced on the table, of my sewing-basket open when I always leave it closed, of a burnt match on the floor, whereas it is one of my orderly habits never to leave burnt matches around. And at last the burnt match became a sort of clue, for I suspected that it had been used to light one of the candles that sat in holders of every sort, on the top of the library shelves.
I tried getting up at night and peering over the
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