Looking back, I think it strange that the example of his cool fearlessness so far wrought upon me that I would not allow the mystery to prey upon my spirits, or to make me afraid to go about the house as I had been wont to do. Once my father broke the reserve we maintained, even to each other, by asking if I would like to exchange my sleeping-room for another. “Why should I?” I interrogated, trying to laugh. “We are not sure where _she_ goes after she leaves it. It is something to know that she is no longer there.” Mea had to be taken into confidence after she burst into the drawing-room at twilight, one evening, and shut the door, setting her back against it and trembling from head to foot. She was as white as a sheet, and when she spoke, it was in a whisper. Something had chased her down-stairs, she declared. The hall-lamp was burning, and she could see, by looking over her shoulder, that the halls and stairs were empty but for her terrified self. But Something—_Somebody_—in high-heeled shoes, that went “Tap! tap! tap!” on the oaken floor and staircase, was behind her from the time she left the upper chamber where she had been dressing, until she reached the parlor door. Her nerves were not as stout as mine, perhaps, but she was no coward, and she was not given to foolish imaginations. When we told her what had been seen, she took a more philosophical view of the situation than I was able to do. “Bodiless things can’t hurt bodies!” she opined, and readily joined our secret circle. Were we, as a family, as I heard a woman say when we were not panic-stricken at the rumored approach of yellow-fever, “a queer lot, taken altogether”? I think so, sometimes. The crisis came in February of that same winter.