Naturally, with so much of her attention fixed upon the raps down-stairs, Sylvia began to fancy renewed rappings all round her in the darkness, and not merely rappings, but all sorts of nocturnal shufflings and scrapings and whisperings and scratchings, until she had to relight her candle. The noises became less, but optical delusions were substituted for tricks of hearing, and there was not a piece of furniture in the room that did not project from its outward form the sense of its independent reality. The wardrobe, for instance, seemed to challenge her with the thought that it was no longer the receptacle of her skirts and petticoats: it seemed to be asserting its essential "wardrobishness" for being the receptacle for anything it liked. Sylvia set aside as too obviously and particularly silly the fancy that some one might be hidden in the wardrobe, but she could not get rid of the fancy that the piece of furniture had an existence outside her own consciousness. It was a mere Hans Andersen kind of fancy, but it took her back to remote childish apprehensions of inanimate objects, and after her meditation upon instinct she began to wonder whether, after all, the child was not quite right to be afraid of everything, which grown-ups called being afraid of nothing; and whether that escape from childish terrors which was called knowledge was nothing but a drug that blunted the perceptions and impeded the capacity for esteeming whatever approximated to truth. Yet why should a child be afraid of a wardrobe? Why should a child be afraid of everything? Because in everything there was evil. Sylvia recalled--and in this room it was impossible to rid herself of that diabolic obsession--that the devil was known as the Father of Lies. Was not all evil anti-truth, and did not man, with his preference for anti-truth, create the material evil that was used as an argument against the divine ordering of matter? Paradoxical as it might seem, the worse ordered the world appeared the more did such an appearance of pessimism involve the existence of God. Whither led all this theosophistry? Toward the only perfect revelation of God in man: toward Jesus Christ.