I was afraid.  I was afraid of the night visitor, 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 things that had troubled me were real, and how many I had made for myself.

To tell the truth, by that time the tension was almost unbearable.  My nerves were going, and there was no reason for it.  I kept telling myself that.  In the mirror I looked white and anxious, and I had a sense of approaching trouble.  I caught Maggie watching me, too, and on the seventh I find in my journal the words:  “Insanity is often only a formless terror.”