“I was at the top in a moment, on the level where she stood leaning over the handrail. Turning, I approached her. Apparently, she neither saw nor heard me. ‘Well acted!’ I said to myself--but even then I was beginning to be afraid, without knowing why. Every man’s impulse, I fancy, is to go right up to anything that frightens him--at least, I have always found it so. I walked close up to the woman. She moved her head and turned in my direction, but only as if about to go away. Whether she looked at me I can not tell, but I saw her eyes plain enough. By this time, I suppose, the idea of a ghost must have been uppermost, for, being now quite close to her, I put out my hand as if to touch her. _My hand went through her--through her head and body!_ I am not joking in the least; I mean you to believe, if you can, exactly what I say. What then she did, or whether she took any notice of my movement, I can not tell; I only know what I did, or rather what I did not do. For, had I been capable, I should have uttered a shriek that would have filled the house with ghastliest terror; but there was a load of iron on my chest, and the hand of a giant at my throat. I could not help opening my mouth, for something drew all the muscles of my jaws and throat, but I could not utter a sound. The horror I was in, was entirely new to me, and no more under my control than a fever. I only wonder it did not paralyze me, that I was able to turn and run down the stair! I ran as if all the cardinal sins were at my heels. I flew, never seeming to touch the stairs as I went. I darted along the passage, burst into my room, shut and locked the door, lighted my candles, fell into a chair, shuddered, and began to breathe again.” He ceased, not without present signs of the agitation he described. “But that’s not all!” “And what else?” “Did anything happen?” “Do tell us more.” “I have nothing more to tell,” answered Sefton. “But I haven’t done wondering what could have put me in such an awful funk! You can’t have a notion what it was like!” “I know I should have been in a worse!” “Perhaps--but why? Why should any one have been terrified? The poor thing had lost her body, it is true, but there she was notwithstanding--all the same! It might be nicer or not so nice to her, but why should it so affect me? that’s what I want to know! Am I not, as Hamlet says, ‘a thing immortal as itself?’ I don’t see the sense of it! Sure I am that one meets constantly--sits down with, eats and drinks with, hears sing, and play, and remark on the weather, and the fate of the nation--” He paused, his eyes fixed on Walter. “What _are_ you driving at?” said Lufa. “I was thinking of a much more fearful kind of creature,” he answered. “What kind of a creature?” she asked.