Holding fast to the white flimsy thing, she sprang out of bed, ran to the window which was open, slipped the screen, and flung it out; but a sudden gust of wind, though the night was calm, arose and it floated back in her face.  She brushed it aside like a cobweb and she clutched at it.  She was actually furious.  It eluded her clutching fingers.  Then she did not see it at all.  She examined the floor, she lighted her lamp again and searched, but there was no sign of it.

Mrs. Simmons was then in such a rage that all terror had disappeared for the time.  She did not know with what she was angry, but she had a sense of some mocking presence which was silently proving too strong against her weakness, and she was aroused to the utmost power of resistance.  To be baffled like this and resisted by something which was as nothing to her straining 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 Lippineott spoke out bluntly.