perience in Queen's Gate,
and he had gone through a variety of emotions. Bewildered terror was
the first, a nervous interest the next, a truculent skepticism the
third; and lately, to his astonishment, the nervous interest had begun
to revive.

At first he had been filled with unreasoning fear. He had walked back
as far as the gate of the park, hardly knowing where he went,
conscious only that he must be in the company of his fellows; upon
finding himself on the south side of Hyde Park Corner, where travelers
were few, he had crossed over in nervous haste to where he might
jostle human beings. Then he had dined in a restaurant, knowing that a
band would be playing there, and had drunk a bottle of champagne; he
had gone to his rooms, cheered and excited, and had leapt instantly
into bed for fear that his courage should evaporate. For he was
perfectly aware that fear, and a sickening kind of repulsion, formed a
very large element in his emotions. For nearly two hours, unless three
persons had lied consummately, he--his essential being, that sleepless
self that underlies all--had been in strange company, had become
identified in some horrible manner with the soul of a dead person. It
was as if he had been informed some morning that he had slept all
night with a corpse under his bed. He woke half a dozen times that
night in the pleasant curtained bedroom, and each time with the terror
upon him. What if stories were true, and this Thing still haunted the
air? It was remarkable, he considered afterwards, how the sign which
he had demanded had not had the effect for which he had hoped. He was
not at all reassured by it.

Then as the days went by, and he was left in peace, his horror began
to pass. He turned the thing over in his mind a dozen times a day, and
found it absorbing. But he began to reflect that, after all, he had
nothing more than he had had before in the way of evidence. An
hypnotic sleep might explain the whole thing. That little revelation
he had made in his unconsciousness, of his sitting beneath the yews,
might easily be accounted for by the fact that he himself knew it,
that it had been a deeper element in his experience than he had known,
and that he had told it aloud. It was no proof of anything more. There
remained the rapping and what the medium had called his "appearance"
during the sleep; but of all this he had read before in books. Why
should he be convinced any more now than he had been previously?