'Oh yes, she's alive.'

'Well, that was nice, anyway.'

'I believe you are frightened,' I murmured, as she still lingered.

'Frightened? What of?'

'The Berlin gentleman.'

'Absurd,' said Charlotte, and went away.

I was having a most cheerful dream in which I tried hard to remember the exact words Herbert Spencer uses about effete beliefs that, in the stole, still cling about the necks of priests, and, in gaiters, linger round the legs of bishops, and was repeating the words about the bishops in a rapture of enjoyment—and indeed it is a lovely sentence—when a sudden pause of fear came into my dream, and I felt that some one beside myself was in the room.

The dark to me has always been full of terrors. I can look back through my memories and find past years studded with horrible black nights on which I woke up and was afraid. Till I have lit a candle, how can I remember that I do not believe in ghosts, and in nameless hideousnesses infinitely more frightful than ghosts? But what courage is needed to sit up in all the solid, pressing blackness, and stretch out one defenceless hand into it to feel about for the matches, appalled by the echoing noises the search produces, cold with fear that the hand may touch something unknown and terrible. And so at Binz, dragged out of my pleasant dream to night and loneliness, I could not move for a moment for sheer extremity of fright. When I did, when I did put out a shaking hand to feel for the matches, the dread of years became a reality—I touched another hand. Now I think it was very wonderful of me not to scream. I suppose I did not dare. I don't know how I managed it, petrified as I was with terror, but the next thing that happened was that I found myself under the bedclothes thinking things over. Whose hand had I touched? And what was it doing on my table? It was a nasty, cold hand, and it had clutched at mine as I tore it away. Oh—there it was, coming after me—it was feeling its way along the bedclothes—surely it was not real—it must be a nightmare—and that was why no sound came when I tried to shriek for Charlotte—but what a horrible nightmare—so very, very real—I could hear the hand sliding along the sheet to the corner where I was huddling—oh, why had I come to this frightful island? A gasp of helpless horror did get out, and instantly Charlotte's voice whispered, 'Be quiet. Don't make a sound. There's a man outside your window.'

At this my senses came back to me with a rush. 'You've nearly killed me,' I whispered, filling the whisper with as much hot indignation as it would hold. 'If my heart had had anything the matter with it I would have died. Let me go—I want to light the candle. What does a man, a real living man, matter?'

Charlotte held me tighter. 'Be quiet,' she whispered, in an agony, it seemed, of fear. 'Be quiet—he isn't—he doesn't look—I don't think he is alive.'