For he was
perfectly aware that fear, and a sickening kind of repulsion, formed a
very large element in his emotions. For nearly two hours, unless three
persons had lied consummately, he--his essential being, that sleepless
self that underlies all--had been in strange company, had become
identified in some horrible manner with the soul of a dead person. It
was as if he had been informed some morning that he had slept all
night with a corpse under his bed. He woke half a dozen times that
night in the pleasant curtained bedroom, and each time with the terror
upon him. What if stories were true, and this Thing still haunted the
air? It was remarkable, he considered afterwards, how the sign which
he had demanded had not had the effect for which he had hoped. He was
not at all reassured by it.
Then as the days went by, and he was left in peace, his horror began
to pass. He turned the thing over in his mind a dozen times a day, and
found it absorbing. But he began to reflect that, after all, he had
nothing more than he had had before in the way of evidence. An
hypnotic sleep might explain the whole thing. That little revelation
he had made in his unconsciousness, of his sitting beneath the yews,
might easily be accounted for by the fact that he himself knew it,
that it had been a deeper element in his experience than he had known,
and that he had told it aloud.
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