s in charge. Not the Agnes
Blakiston I knew, but another Agnes Blakiston, perhaps, was exerting a
temporary dominance, a hectic, craven, and hateful control.

That is the only outburst I recall. Possibly Maggie may have others
stored away. She has a tenacious memory. Certainly it was my nearest
approach to violence. But it had the effect of making me set a watch on
myself.

Possibly it was coincidence. Probably, however, Maggie had communicated
with Willie. But two days later young Martin Sprague, Freda Sprague's
son, stopped his car in the drive and came in. He is a nerve specialist,
and very good, although I can remember when he came down in his night
drawers to one of his mother's dinner-parties.

"Thought I would just run in and see you," he said. "Mother told me you
were here. By George, Miss Agnes, you look younger than ever."

"Who told you to come, Martie?" I asked.

"Told me? I don't have to be told to visit an old friend."

Well, he asked himself to lunch, and looked over the house, and decided
to ask Miss Emily if she would sell an old Japanese cabinet inlaid with
mother of pearl that I would not have had as a gift. And, in the end,
I told him my trouble, of the fear that seemed to center around the
telephone, and the sleep-walking.

He listened carefully.

"Ever get any bad news over the telephone?" he asked.

One way and another, I said I had had plenty of it. He went over me
thoroughly, and was inclined to find my experience with the flour rather
amusing than otherwise. "It's rather good, that," he said. "Setting a
trap to catch yourself. You'd better have Maggie sleep in your room for
a while. Well, it's all pretty plain, Miss Agnes. We bury some things as
deep as possible, especially if we don't want to remember that they ever
happened. But the mind's a queer thing. It holds on pretty hard, and
burying is not destroying. Then we get tired or nervous--maybe
just holding the thing down and pretending it is not there makes us
nervous--and up it pops, like the ghost of a buried body, and raises
hell. You don't mind that, do you?" he added anxiously. "It's exactly
what those things do raise."

"But," I demanded irritably, "who rings the telephone at night? I
daresay you don't contend that I go out at night and call the house, and
then come back and answer the call, do you?"

He looked at me with a maddening smile.

"Are you sure it really rings?" he asked.

And so bad was my nervous condition