It was too early, I reasoned, for the night calls.  It might be anything, a telegram at the station, Willie’s boy run over by an automobile, Gertrude’s children ill.  A dozen possibilities ran through my mind.

And Maggie would not let me out!

“You’re not going downstairs,” she called, from a safe distance.

“Maggie!” I cried, sharply.  And banged at the door.  The telephone was ringing steadily.  “Come here at once.”

“Miss Agnes,” she beseeched, “you go to bed and don’t listen.  There’ll be nothing there, for all your trouble,” she said, in a quavering voice.  “It’s nothing human that rings that bell.”

Finally, however, she freed me, and I went down the stairs.  I had carried down a lamp, and my nerves were vibrating to the rhythm of the bell’s shrill summons.  But, strangely enough, the fear had left me.  I find, as always, that it is difficult to put into words.  I did not relish the excursion to the lower floor.  I resented the jarring sound of the bell.  But the terror was gone.

I went back to the telephone.  Something that was living and moving was there.  I saw its eyes, lower than mine, reflecting the lamp like twin lights.  I was frightened, but still it was not the fear.  The twin lights leaped forward—­and proved to be the eyes of Miss Emily’s cat, which had been sleeping on the stand!

I answered the telephone.  To my surprise it was Miss Emily herself, a quiet and very dignified voice which apologized for disturbing me at that hour, and went on: 

“I feel that I was very abrupt this afternoon, Miss Blakiston.  My excuse is that I have always feared change.  I have lived in a rut too long, I’m afraid.  But of course, if you feel you would like to move the telephone, or put in an upstairs instrument, you may do as you like.”

She seemed, having got me there, unwilling to ring off.  I got a curious effect of reluctance over the telephone, and there was one phrase that she repeated several times.

“I do not want to influence you.  I want you to do just what you think best.”

The fear was entirely gone by the time she rang off.  I felt, instead, a sort of relaxation that was most comforting.  The rear hall, a cul-de-sac of nervousness in the daytime and of horror at night, was suddenly transformed by the light of my lamp into a warm and cheerful refuge from the darkness of the lower floor.  The purring of the cat, comfortably settled on the telephone-stand, was as cheering as the singing of a kettle on a stove.  On the rack near me my garden hat and an old Paisley shawl made a grotesque human effigy.

I sat back in the low wicker chair and surveyed the hallway.  Why not, I considered, do away now with the fear of it?  If I could conquer it like this at midnight, I need never succumb again to it in the light.

The cat leaped to the stand beside me and stood there, waiting.  He was an intelligent animal, and I am like a good many spinsters.  I am not more fond of cats than other people, but I understand them better.  And it seemed to me that he and I were going through some familiar program, of which a part had been neglected.  The cat neither sat nor lay, but stood there, waiting.