But I do not regard the strange calls over the telephone as so
important as my attitude to them. The plain truth is that my fear
of the calls extended itself in a few days to cover the instrument,
and more than that, to the part of the house it stood in. Maggie
never had this, nor did she recognize it in me. Her fear was a
perfectly simple although uncomfortable one, centering around the
bedrooms where, in each bed, she nightly saw dead and gone Bentons
laid out in all the decorum of the best linen.

On more than one evening she came to the library door, with an
expression of mentally looking over her shoulder, and some such
dialogue would follow:

"D'you mind if I turn the bed down now, Miss Agnes?"

"It's very early."

"S'almost eight." When she is nervous she cuts verbal corners.

"You know perfectly well that I dislike having the beds disturbed
until nine o'clock, Maggie."

"I'm going out."

"You said that last night, but you didn't go."

Silence.

"Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of--"