Willie left that night, the 16th, and we settled down to quiet days, and, for a time, to undisturbed nights. But on the following Wednesday, by my journal, the telephone commenced to bother me again. Generally speaking, it rang rather early, between eleven o'clock and midnight. But on the following Saturday night I find I have recorded the hour as 2 a.m. In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never rang the second time. When I went downstairs to answer it--I did not always go--there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing else. It was on the twenty-fourth that I had the telephone inspected and reported in normal condition, and it is possibly significant that for three days afterward my record shows not a single disturbance. But I do not regard the strange calls over the telephone as so important as my attitude to them. The plain truth is that my fear of the calls extended itself in a few days to cover the instrument, and more than that, to the part of the house it stood in. Maggie never had this, nor did she recognize it in me. Her fear was a perfectly simple although uncomfortable one, centering around the bedrooms where, in each bed, she nightly saw dead and gone Bentons laid out in all the decorum of the best linen. On more than one evening she came to the library door, with an expression of mentally looking over her shoulder, and some such dialogue would follow: "D'you mind if I turn the bed down now, Miss Agnes?" "It's very early." "S'almost eight." When she is nervous she cuts verbal corners. "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.