She took a step toward the door, then she turned with a resolute air.  “As for going downstairs and owning up I’m scared and having that Lippincott girl crowing over me, I won’t for any red roses instead of peacocks.  I guess they can’t hurt me, and as long as we’ve both of us seen ’em I guess we can’t both be getting loony,” she said.

Mrs. Elvira Simmons blew out her light and got into bed and lay staring out between the chintz hangings at the moonlit room.  She said her prayers in bed always as being more comfortable, and presumably just as acceptable in the case of a faithful servant with a stout habit of body.  Then after a little she fell asleep; she was of too practical a nature to be kept long awake by anything which had no power of actual bodily effect upon her.  No stress of the spirit had ever disturbed her slumbers.  So she slumbered between the red roses, or the peacocks, she did not know which.

But she was awakened about midnight by a strange sensation in her throat.  She had dreamed that some one with long white fingers was strangling her, and she saw bending over her the face of an old woman in a white cap.  When she waked there was no old woman, the room was almost as light as day in the full moonlight, and looked very peaceful; but the strangling sensation at her throat continued, and besides that, her face and ears felt muffled.  She put up her hand and felt that her head was covered with a ruffled nightcap tied under her chin so tightly that it was exceedingly uncomfortable.  A great qualm of horror shot over her.  She tore the thing off frantically and flung it from her with a convulsive effort as if it had been a spider.  She gave, as she did so, a quick, short scream of terror.  She sprang out of bed and was going toward the door, when she stopped.

It had suddenly occurred to her that Eliza Lippincott might have entered the room and tied on the cap while she was asleep.  She had not locked her door.  She looked in the closet, under the bed; there was no one there.  Then she tried to open the door, but to her astonishment found that it was locked—­bolted on the inside.  “I must have locked it, after all,” she reflected with wonder, for she never locked her door.  Then she could scarcely conceal from herself that there was something out of the usual about it all.  Certainly no one could have entered the room and departed locking the door on the inside.  She could not control the long shiver of horror that crept over her, but she was still resolute.  She resolved that she would throw the cap out of the window.  “I’ll see if I have tricks like that played on me, I don’t care who does it,” said she quite aloud.  She was still unable to believe wholly in the supernatural.  The idea of some human agency was still in her mind, filling her with anger.

She went toward the spot where she had thrown the cap—­she had stepped over it on her way to the door—­but it was not there.  She searched the whole room, lighting her lamp, but she could not find the cap.  Finally she gave it up.  She extinguished her lamp and went back to bed.  She fell asleep again, to be again awakened in the same fashion.  That time she tore off the cap as before, but she did not fling it on the floor as before.  Instead she held to it with a fierce grip.  Her blood was up.