“We went in, he shuffling after me through the unlighted hall up to the first floor where the murder had taken place, and I prepared myself to hear his inevitable account before turning him out with the half-crown his persistence had earned.  After lighting the gas I sat down in the arm-chair he had provided—­a faded, brown plush arm-chair—­and turned for the first time to face him and get through with the performance as quickly as possible.  And it was in that instant I got my first shock.  The man was not the caretaker.  It was not the old fool, Carey, I had interviewed earlier in the day and made my plans with.  My heart gave a horrid jump.

“‘Now who are you, pray?’ I said.  ’You’re not Carey, the man I arranged with this afternoon.  Who are you?’

“I felt uncomfortable, as you may imagine.  I was a ’psychical researcher,’ and a young woman of new tendencies, and proud of my liberty, but I did not care to find myself in an empty house with a stranger.  Something of my confidence left me.  Confidence with women, you know, is all humbug after a certain point.  Or perhaps you don’t know, for most of you are men.  But anyhow my pluck ebbed in a quick rush, and I felt afraid.

“‘Who are you?’ I repeated quickly and nervously.  The fellow was well dressed, youngish and good-looking, but with a face of great sadness.  I myself was barely thirty.  I am giving you essentials, or I would not mention it.  Out of quite ordinary things comes this story.  I think that’s why it has value.

“‘No,’ he said; ‘I’m the man who was frightened to death.’

“His voice and his words ran through me like a knife, and I felt ready to drop.  In my pocket was the book I had bought to make notes in.  I felt the pencil sticking in the socket.  I felt, too, the extra warm things I had put on to sit up in, as no bed or sofa was available—­a hundred things dashed through my mind, foolishly and without sequence or meaning, as the way is when one is really frightened.  Unessentials leaped up and puzzled me, and I thought of what the papers might say if it came out, and what my ‘smart’ brother-in-law would think, and whether it would be told that I had cigarettes in my pocket, and was a free-thinker.

“‘The man who was frightened to death!’ I repeated aghast.

“‘That’s me,’ he said stupidly.

“I stared at him just as you would have done—­any one of you men now listening to me—­and felt my life ebbing and flowing like a sort of hot fluid.  You needn’t laugh!  That’s how I felt.  Small things, you know, touch the mind with great earnestness when terror is there—­real terror.  But I might have been at a middle-class tea-party, for all the ideas I had:  they were so ordinary!

“’But I thought you were the caretaker I tipped this afternoon to let me sleep here!’ I gasped.  ‘Did—­did Carey send you to meet me?’

“‘No,’ he replied in a voice that touched my boots somehow.  ’I am the man who was frightened to death.  And what is more, I am frightened now!’