Maggie's
attitude. She knew, in some strange way. But she did not know that she
knew--which sounds like nonsense and is as near as I can come to getting
it down in words.

Willie left that night, the 16th, and we settled down to quiet days,
and, for a time, to undisturbed nights. But on the following Wednesday,
by my journal, the telephone commenced to bother me again. Generally
speaking, it rang rather early, between eleven o'clock and midnight. But
on the following Saturday night I find I have recorded the hour as 2 a.m.

In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never rang
the second time. When I went downstairs to answer it--I did not always
go--there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing else. It
was on the twenty-fourth that I had the telephone inspected and reported
in normal condition, and it is possibly significant that for three days
afterward my record shows not a single disturbance.

But I do not regard the strange calls over the telephone as so important
as my attitude to them. The plain truth is that my fear of the calls
extended itself in a few days to cover the instrument, and more than
that, to the part of the house it stood in. Maggie never had this, nor
did she recognize it in me. Her fear was a perfectly simple although
uncomfortable one, centering around the bedrooms where, in each bed,
she nightly saw dead and gone Bentons laid out in all the decorum of the
best linen.

On more than one evening she came to the library door, with an
expression of mentally looking over her shoulder, and some such dialogue
would follow:

"D'you mind if I turn the bed down now, Miss Agnes?"

"It's very early."

"S'almost eight." When she is nervous she cuts verbal corners.

"You know perfectly well that I dislike having the beds disturbed until
nine o'clock, Maggie."

"I'm going out."

"You said that last night, but you didn't go."

Silence.

"Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of--" I
hesitated--"of fear. When you have really seen or heard something, it
will be time enough to be nervous."

"Humph!" said Maggie on one of these occasions, and edged into the room.
It was growing dusk. "It will be too late then, Miss Agnes. And another
thing. You're a brave woman. I don't know as I've seen a braver. But I
notice you keep away from the telephone after dark."

The general outcome of these conversations was that, to avoid argument,
I permitted the pr