a little in my ears for a moment; then I thought I heard it again.  I felt sure that something had moved at the top of the aisle.  I strained in the darkness, to hark; and my eyes showed me blackness within blackness, wherever I glanced, so that I took no heed of what they told me; for even if I looked at the dim loom of the stained window at the top of the chancel, my sight gave me the shapes of vague shadows passing noiseless and ghostly across, constantly.  There was a time of almost peculiar silence, horrible to me, as I felt just then.  And suddenly I seemed to hear a sound again, nearer to me, and repeated, infinitely stealthy.  It was as if a vast, soft tread were coming slowly down the aisle.

“Can you imagine how I felt?  I do not think you can.  I did not move, any more than the stone effigies on the two tombs; but sat there, stiffened.  I fancied now, that I heard the tread all about the Chapel.  And then, you know, I was just as sure in a moment that I could not hear it—­that I had never heard it.

“Some particularly long minutes passed, about this time; but I think my nerves must have quieted a bit; for I remember being sufficiently aware of my feelings, to realize that the muscles of my shoulders ached, with the way that they must have been contracted, as I sat there, hunching myself, rigid.  Mind you, I was still in a disgusting funk; but what I might call the ‘imminent sense of danger’ seemed to have eased from around me; at any rate, I felt, in some curious fashion, that there was a respite—­a temporary cessation of malignity from about me.  It is impossible to word my feelings more clearly to you, for I cannot see them more clearly than this, myself.

“Yet, you must not picture me as sitting there, free from strain; for the nerve tension was so great that my heart action was a little out of normal control, the blood beat making a dull booming at times in my ears, with the result that I had the sensation that I could not hear acutely.  This is a simply beastly feeling, especially under such circumstances.

“I was sitting like this, listening, as I might say with body and soul, when suddenly I got that hideous conviction again that something was moving in the air of the place.  The feeling seemed to stiffen me, as I sat, and my head appeared to tighten, as if all the scalp had grown tense.  This was so real, that I suffered an actual pain, most peculiar and at the same time intense; the whole head pained.  I had a fierce desire to cover my face again with my mailed arms, but I fought it off.  If I had given way then to that, I should simply have bunked straight out of the place.  I sat and sweated coldly (that’s the bald truth), with the ‘creep’ busy at my spine....