or, but, more than that,
I was afraid of the fear. It had become a real thing by that time,
something that lurked in the lower back hall waiting to catch me by the
throat, to stop my breath, to paralyze me so I could not escape. I never
went beyond that point.

Yet I am not a cowardly woman. I have lived alone too long for that. I
have closed too many houses at night and gone upstairs in the dark to be
afraid of darkness. And even now I can not, looking back, admit that
I was afraid of the darkness there, although I resorted to the weak
expedient of leaving a short length of candle to burn itself out in the
hall when I went up to bed.

I have seen one of Willie's boys waken up at night screaming with a
terror he could not describe. Well, it was much like that with me,
except that I was awake and horribly ashamed of myself.

On the fourth of August I find in my journal the single word "flour."
It recalls both my own cowardice at that time, and an experiment I made.
The telephone had not bothered us for several nights, and I began to
suspect a connection of this sort: when the telephone rang, there was no
night visitor, and vice versa. I was not certain.

Delia was setting bread that night in the kitchen, and Maggie was
reading a ghost story from the evening paper. There was a fine sifting
of flour over the table, and it gave me my idea. When I went up to bed
that night, I left a powdering of flour here and there on the lower
floor, at the door into the library, a patch by the table, and--going
back rather uneasily--one near the telephone.

I was up and downstairs before Maggie the next morning. The patches
showed trampling. In the doorway they were almost obliterated, as by
the trailing of a garment over them, but by the fireplace there were two
prints quite distinct. I knew when I saw them that I had expected the
marks of Miss Emily's tiny foot, although I had not admitted it before.
But these were not Miss Emily's. They were large, flat, substantial, and
one showed a curious marking around the edge that--It was my own! The
marking was the knitted side of my bedroom slipper. I had, so far as
I could tell, gone downstairs, in the night, investigated the candles,
possibly in darkness, and gone back to bed again.

The effect of the discovery on me was--well undermining. In all the
uneasiness of the past few weeks I had at least had full confidence in
myself. And now that was gone. I began to wonder how much of the th