ning senses filled her with intensest
resentment.

Finally she got back into bed again; she did not go to sleep. She felt
strangely drowsy, but she fought against it. She was wide awake,
staring at the moonlight, when she suddenly felt the soft white strings
of the thing tighten around her throat and realized that her enemy was
again upon her. She seized the strings, untied them, twitched off the
cap, ran with it to the table where her scissors lay and furiously cut
it into small bits. She cut and tore, feeling an insane fury of
gratification.

"There!" said she quite aloud. "I guess I sha'n't have any more
trouble with this old cap."

She tossed the bits of muslin into a basket and went back to bed.
Almost immediately she felt the soft strings tighten around her throat.
Then at last she yielded, vanquished. This new refutal of all laws of
reason by which she had learned, as it were, to spell her theory of
life, was too much for her equilibrium. She pulled off the clinging
strings feebly, drew the thing from her head, slid weakly out of bed,
caught up her wrapper and hastened out of the room. She went
noiselessly along the hall to her own old room: she entered, got into
her familiar bed, and lay there the rest of the night shuddering and
listening, and if she dozed, waking with a start at the feeling of the
pressure upon her throat to find that it was not there, yet still to be
unable to shake off entirely the horror.

When daylight came she crept back to the southwest chamber and
hurriedly got some clothes in which to dress herself. It took all her
resolution to enter the room, but nothing unusual happened while she
was there. She hastened back to her old chamber, dressed herself and
went down to breakfast with an imperturbable face. Her colour had not
faded. When asked by Eliza Lippincott how she had slept, she replied
with an appearance of calmness which was bewildering that she had not
slept very well. She never did sleep very well in a new bed, and she
thought she would go back to her old room.

Eliza Lippincott was not deceived, however, neither were the Gill
sisters, nor the young girl, Flora. Eliza Lippincott spoke out bluntly.

"You needn't talk to me about sleeping well," said she. "I know
something queer happened in that room last night by the way you act."

They all looked at Mrs. Simmons, inquiringly--the librarian with
malicious curiosity and triumph, the minister with sad incredulit