er can be replaced,
but as I said to my wife then, Horace Johnson could not. But she had
recently acquired a tea set formerly belonging to her great-grandmother,
and apprehension regarding it made her, for the nonce, less solicitous
for me than usual.

"Either you go or I go," she said. "Where's your revolver?"

I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs. But I must confess
that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably less
trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to the
darkness itself. Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom, and
there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower hall.

We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric light.
I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs the one I had
lighted went out. I was terrified. I tried to light another match, but
there was a draft from somewhere, and it too was extinguished before I
had had time to glance about. I was immediately conscious of a sort of
soft movement around me, as of shadowy shapes that passed and repassed.
Once it seemed to me that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not
lifted, but instead dissolved into the other shadows around. The sudden
striking of the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization.
I turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by ghostly
hands that came toward me from between the spindles of the stair-rail.

At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself. I found
that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the soft
movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.

Probably. I was not certain. Indeed, I was certain of nothing during
those strange days. I had built up for myself a universe upheld by
certain laws, of day and night, of food and sleep and movement, of three
dimensions of space. And now, it seemed to me, I had stood all my life
but on the threshold, and, for an hour or so, the door had opened.

Sperry had, I believe, told Herbert Robinson of what we had discovered,
but nothing had been said to the women. I knew through my wife that they
were wildly curious, and the night of the second seance Mrs. Dane drew
me aside and I saw that she suspected, without knowing, that we had been
endeavoring to check up our revelations with the facts.

"I want you to promise me one thing," she said. "I'll not bother you
now. But I'm an old woman, with not much more of life to be