d fallen
to the floor.

Since that time I know there is a madness of courage, born of terror.
Nothing could be more intolerable than to sit there and wait. It is
the same insanity that drove men out of the trenches to the charge and
almost certain death, rather than to sit and wait for what might come.

In a way, I daresay I charged the upper floor of the house. Recalling
the situation from this safe lapse of time, I think that I was in a
condition close to frenzy. I know that it did not occur to me to leap
down the staircase and escape, and I believe now this was due to a
conviction that I was dealing with the supernatural, and that on no
account did I dare to turn my back on it. All children and some adults,
I am sure, have known this feeling.

Whatever drove me, I know that, candle in hand, and hardly sane, I ran
up the staircase, and into the room overhead. It was empty.

As suddenly as my sanity had gone, it returned to me. The sight of two
small beds, side by side, a tiny dressing-table, a row of toys on the
mantelpiece, was calming. Here was the children's night nursery, a white
and placid room which could house nothing hideous.

I was humiliated and ashamed. I, Horace Johnson, a man of dignity and
reputation, even in a small way, a successful after-dinner speaker,
numbering fifty-odd years of logical living to my credit, had been
running half-maddened toward a mythical danger from which I had been
afraid to run away!

I sat down and mopped my face with my pocket handkerchief.

After a time I got up, and going to a window looked down at the quiet
world below. The fog was lifting. Automobiles were making cautious
progress along the slippery street. A woman with a basket had stopped
under the street light and was rearranging her parcels. The clock of the
city hall, visible over the opposite roofs, marked only twenty minutes
to nine. It was still early evening--not even midnight, the magic hour
of the night.

Somehow that fact reassured me, and I was able to take stock of my
surroundings. I realized, for instance, that I stood in the room over
Arthur's dressing room, and that it was into the ceiling under me that
the second--or probably the first--bullet had penetrated. I know, as
it happens, very little of firearms, but I did realize that a shot from
a.45 Colt automatic would have considerable penetrative power. To be
exact, that the bullet had probably either lodged itself in a joist, or
had penetrated t