ed.... He had no weight.

'I knew that if I leaned forward and thrust my hand between those brass
rails, to clutch his foot, I should clutch--nothing. He wasn't tangible.
He was realistic. He wasn't real. He was opaque. He wasn't solid.

'Odd as it may seem to you, these certainties took the edge off my
horror. During that walk with Lady Rodfitten, I had been appalled by the
doubt that haunted me. But now the very confirmation of that doubt gave
me a sort of courage: I could cope better with anything to-night than
with actual Braxton. And the measure of the relief I felt is that I sat
down again on my chair.

'More than once there came to me a wild hope that the thing might be an
optical delusion, after all. Then would I shut my eyes tightly, shaking
my head sharply; but, when I looked again, there the presence was, of
course. It--he--not actual Braxton but, roughly speaking, Braxton--had
come to stay. I was conscious of intense fatigue, taut and alert though
every particle of me was; so that I became, in the course of that
ghastly night, conscious of a great envy also. For some time before the
dawn came in through the window, Braxton's eyes had been closed; little
by little now his head drooped sideways, then fell on his forearm and
rested there. He was asleep.

'Cut off from sleep, I had a great longing for smoke. I had cigarettes
on me, I had matches on me. But I didn't dare to strike a match. The
sound might have waked Braxton up. In slumber he was less terrible,
though perhaps more odious. I wasn't so much afraid now as indignant.
"It's intolerable," I sat saying to myself, "utterly intolerable!"

'I had to bear it, nevertheless. I was aware that I had, in some degree,
brought it on myself. If I hadn't interfered and lied, actual Braxton
would have been here at Keeb, and I at this moment sleeping soundly. But
this was no excuse for Braxton. Braxton didn't know what I had done. He
was merely envious of me. And--wanly I puzzled it out in the dawn--by
very force of the envy, hatred, and malice in him he had projected
hither into my presence this simulacrum of himself. I had known that he
would be thinking of me. I had known that the thought of me at Keeb Hall
would be of the last bitterness to his most sacred feelings. But--I had
reckoned without the passionate force and intensity of the man's nature.

'If by this same strength and intensity he had merely projected himself
as an invisible guest under the Duchess'