“Exactly,” I said drily.

It is of course possible that my nerves were somewhat unstrung during the days that followed.  I wakened one night to a terrific thump which shook my bed, and which seemed to be the result of some one having struck the foot-board with a plank.  Immediately following this came a sharp knocking on the antique bed-warmer which hangs beside my fireplace.  When I had sufficiently recovered my self-control I turned on my bedside lamp, but the room was empty.

Again I wakened with a feeling of intense cold.  I was frozen with it, and curiously enough it was an inner cold.  It seemed to have nothing to do with the surface of my body.  I have no explanation to make of these phenomena.  Like the occurrences at the seance, they were, and that was all.

But on Thursday night of that week my wife came into my bedroom, and stated flatly that there were burglars in the house.

Now it has been my contention always that if a burglar gains entrance, he should be allowed to take what he wants.  Silver can be replaced, but as I said to my wife then, Horace Johnson could not.  But she had recently acquired a tea set formerly belonging to her great-grandmother, and apprehension regarding it made her, for the nonce, less solicitous for me than usual.

“Either you go or I go,” she said.  “Where’s your revolver?”

I got out of bed at that, and went down the stairs.  But I must confess that I felt, the moment darkness surrounded me, considerably less trepidation concerning the possible burglar than I felt as to the darkness itself.  Mrs. Johnson had locked herself in my bedroom, and there was something horrible in the black depths of the lower hall.

We are old-fashioned people, and have not yet adopted electric light.  I carried a box of matches, but at the foot of the stairs the one I had lighted went out.  I was terrified.  I tried to light another match, but there was a draft from somewhere, and it too was extinguished before I had had time to glance about.  I was immediately conscious of a sort of soft movement around me, as of shadowy shapes that passed and repassed.  Once it seemed to me that a hand was laid on my shoulder and was not lifted, but instead dissolved into the other shadows around.  The sudden striking of the clock on the stair landing completed my demoralization.  I turned and fled upstairs, pursued, to my agonized nerves, by ghostly hands that came toward me from between the spindles of the stair-rail.

At dawn I went downstairs again, heartily ashamed of myself.  I found that a door to the basement had been left open, and that the soft movement had probably been my overcoat, swaying in the draft.

Probably.  I was not certain.  Indeed, I was certain of nothing during those strange days.  I had built up for myself a universe upheld by certain laws, of day and night, of food and sleep and movement, of three dimensions of space.  And now, it seemed to me, I had stood all my life but on the threshold, and, for an hour or so, the door had opened.