certain reason which came to her rescue.
"What a little goose I am!" she told herself. "Those are only
reflections. They are the reflections of the light in the street." As
she studied it more closely she saw that the light, being intercepted
by the branches of the trees on the lawn, swaying in a light wind,
produced some of the strange effects at the windows which had seemed
like people moving back and forth in the rooms. Then all at once she
saw another glimmer of light on the front window of her father's room
which she could not account for at all. She moved in front of a long,
fan-shaped ray cast by the electric light in the street, and, looking
at the window, the reflection was still there. She could not account
for that at all, unless it was produced by a light from a house
window--which was probably the case. At all events, it disquieted
her. Still, she overcame her disinclination to enter the house
because of that. She reasoned from analogy. "All the other lights are
reflections," she told herself, "and of course that must be."
However, the main cause of her terror remained: the unfounded,
world-old conviction of presences behind closed doors, the almost
impossibility for a very imaginative person to conceive of an
entirely empty room or house--that is, empty of sentient life. She
had hidden the front-door key under the mat before the front door;
she had lived long enough in the country to acquire that absurdly
innocent habit. She groped for it, thought for a second, with a gasp
of horror, that it was not there. Then she felt it with her gloved
hand, fitted it in the lock, opened the door, and went in, and the
inner darkness smote her like a hostile crowd.

It was actually to the child as if she were passing through a thick
group of mysterious, inimical things concealed by the darkness. It
was as if she heard whispers of conspiracy; it was even as if she
smelled odors of strange garments and bodies. Every sense in her was
on the alert. She even tasted something bitter in her mouth. It was
all absurd. She reiterated in her ears that it was all absurd, but
she had now passed the point wherein reason can support. She had come
through an unusually active imagination into the unknown quantities
and sequences of life. She put out her hands and groped her way
through the darkness of the hall, and the fear lest she should touch
some one, some terrible thing, was as bad as the reality could have
been. She knew best whe