I must confess that Poyning's disappearance affected me with a peculiar sense of horror. There could have been hardly an hour between our going to bed and daylight, yet in that time he had been spirited away, without a cry, without a sound, and for all I knew he might be dead at this moment. I had put up a bold face to him when he was with me, perhaps as much for the purpose of encouraging myself as him, but I now began to be attacked by a vague uneasiness of mind. The attendant warned me not to attempt to go out, but that warning struck me as superfluous. The main door of the house had been shut and locked, and although I could hear no sound from without I knew well enough that the cordon of sentries was still surrounding the building. There, all day, I sat still or strode up and down in that lonely twilit house, sinking steadily lower in spirits, until by real twilight of the outer day I was in such a terrible depression as I had never known before. I couldn't account for it. My situation was perilous enough in all conscience; I might be led out to execution at any moment; but I had often faced death before--I had faced it many times on this adventure--with a light heart. Now abject terror, quaking cowardice--all the torturing emotions with which a craven spirit views danger--seemed to be rushing over me in waves. Then, with a sudden thrill of horror that well nigh made me scream aloud, I realised the truth. Somewhere, I knew not where, the dark powers possessed by these people were being set in motion against me. I cannot hope to adequately portray my feelings--there are no words in our language equal to that terrible anguish of mind. At times I seemed to be undergoing agonies of alarm like those I had felt on the first occasion I was hypnotised in the Hall of Wandering Souls: the blackness of darkness that surrounded and penetrated my brain, and a ghastly _physical_ impression of falling miles through space; but what I had experienced then was mere play to what I felt now. I could not have believed it possible for human personality to plumb such abysses of anguish, for the sensations I underwent were deeper, intenser by far than anything I had ever dreamed; and beyond that, there was a terrifying distinctiveness about this awful obsession. It was a feeling of fear, yet it was not fear; it was like an epitome of all the stabbing sorrows of a lifetime, yet it was more than any human sorrow; and over all, that frightful sense of mental strangulation, as though it were my _soul_ that was writhing in the grip of some soul far mightier, which must soon crush it to nothingness and death.