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      The Confession, by Mary Roberts Rinehart
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The Project Gutenberg EBook of The Confession, by Mary Roberts Rinehart

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Title: The Confession

Author: Mary Roberts Rinehart

Release Date: September 26, 2008 [EBook #1963]
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Language: English

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</pre>
    <p>
      <br /><br />
    </p>
    <h1>
      THE CONFESSION
    </h1>
    <p>
      <br />
    </p>
    <h2>
      By Mary Roberts Rinehart
    </h2>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <h3>
      Contents
    </h3>
    <table summary="" style="margin-right: auto; margin-left: auto">
      <tr>
        <td>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0001"> I </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0002"> II </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0003"> III </a>
          </p>
          <p class="toc">
            <a href="#link2H_4_0004"> IV </a>
          </p>
        </td>
      </tr>
    </table>
    <p>
      <br /> <br />
    </p>
    <hr />
    <p>
      <br /> <br /> <a name="link2H_4_0001" id="link2H_4_0001">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <h2>
      I
    </h2>
    <p>
      I am not a susceptible woman. I am objective rather than subjective, and a
      fairly full experience of life has taught me that most of my impressions
      are from within out rather than the other way about. For instance,
      obsession at one time a few years ago of a shadowy figure on my right,
      just beyond the field of vision, was later exposed as the result of a
      defect in my glasses. In the same way Maggie, my old servant, was during
      one entire summer haunted by church-bells and considered it a personal
      summons to eternity until it was shown to be in her inner ear.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet the Benton house undeniably made me uncomfortable. Perhaps it was
      because it had remained unchanged for so long. The old horsehair chairs,
      with their shiny mahogany frames, showed by the slightly worn places in
      the carpet before them that they had not deviated an inch from their
      position for many years. The carpets&mdash;carpets that reached to the
      very baseboards and gave under one's feet with the yielding of heavy
      padding beneath&mdash;were bright under beds and wardrobes, while in the
      centers of the rooms they had faded into the softness of old tapestry.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie, I remember, on our arrival moved a chair from the wall in the
      library, and immediately put it back again, with a glance to see if I had
      observed her.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's nice and clean, Miss Agnes," she said. "A&mdash;I kind of feel that
      a little dirt would make it more homelike."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'm sure I don't see why," I replied, rather sharply, "I've lived in a
      tolerably clean house most of my life."
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie, however, was digging a heel into the padded carpet. She had chosen
      a sunny place for the experiment, and a small cloud of dust rose like
      smoke.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Germs!" she said. "Just what I expected. We'd better bring the vacuum
      cleaner out from the city, Miss Agnes. Them carpets haven't been lifted
      for years."
    </p>
    <p>
      But I paid little attention to her. To Maggie any particle of matter not
      otherwise classified is a germ, and the prospect of finding dust in that
      immaculate house was sufficiently thrilling to tide over the strangeness
      of our first few hours in it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Once a year I rent a house in the country. When my nephew and niece were
      children, I did it to take them out of the city during school vacations.
      Later, when they grew up, it was to be near the country club. But now,
      with the children married and new families coming along, we were more
      concerned with dairies than with clubs, and I inquired more carefully
      about the neighborhood cows than about the neighborhood golf-links. I had
      really selected the house at Benton Station because there was a most
      alluring pasture, with a brook running through it, and violets over the
      banks. It seemed to me that no cow with a conscience could live in those
      surroundings and give colicky milk.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then, the house was cheap. Unbelievably cheap. I suspected sewerage at
      once, but it seemed to be in the best possible order. Indeed, new plumbing
      had been put in, and extra bathrooms installed. As old Miss Emily Benton
      lived there alone, with only an old couple to look after her, it looked
      odd to see three bathrooms, two of them new, on the second floor. Big tubs
      and showers, although little old Miss Emily could have bathed in the
      washbowl and have had room to spare.
    </p>
    <p>
      I faced the agent downstairs in the parlor, after I had gone over the
      house. Miss Emily Benton had not appeared and I took it she was away.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why all those bathrooms?" I demanded. "Does she use them in rotation?"
    </p>
    <p>
      He shrugged his shoulders.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She wished to rent the house, Miss Blakiston. The old-fashioned plumbing&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "But she is giving the house away," I exclaimed. "Those bathrooms have
      cost much more than she will get out of it. You and I know that the price
      is absurd."
    </p>
    <p>
      He smiled at that. "If you wish to pay more, you may, of course. She is a
      fine woman, Miss Blakiston, but you can never measure a Benton with any
      yard-stick but their own. The truth is that she wants the house off her
      hands this summer. I don't know why. It's a good house, and she has lived
      here all her life. But my instructions, I'll tell you frankly, are to rent
      it, if I have to give it away."
    </p>
    <p>
      With which absurd sentence we went out the front door, and I saw the
      pasture, which decided me.
    </p>
    <p>
      In view of the fact that I had taken the house for my grandnieces and
      nephews, it was annoying to find, by the end of June, that I should have
      to live in it by myself. Willie's boy was having his teeth straightened,
      and must make daily visits to the dentist, and Jack went to California and
      took Gertrude and the boys with him.
    </p>
    <p>
      The first curious thing happened then. I wrote to the agent, saying that I
      would not use the house, but enclosing a check for its rental, as I had
      signed the lease. To my surprise, I received in reply a note from Miss
      Emily herself, very carefully written on thin note-paper.
    </p>
    <p>
      Although it was years since I had seen her, the exquisite neatness of the
      letter, its careful paragraphing, its margins so accurate as to give the
      impression that she had drawn a faint margin line with a lead pencil and
      then erased it&mdash;all these were as indicative of Emily Benton as&mdash;well,
      as the letter was not.
    </p>
    <p>
      As well as I can explain it, the letter was impulsive, almost urgent. Yet
      the little old lady I remembered was neither of these things. "My dear
      Miss Blakiston," she wrote. "But I do hope you will use the house. It was
      because I wanted to be certain that it would be occupied this summer that
      I asked so low a rent for it.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You may call it a whim if you like, but there are reasons why I wish the
      house to have a summer tenant. It has, for one thing, never been empty
      since it was built. It was my father's pride, and his father's before him,
      that the doors were never locked, even at night. Of course I can not ask a
      tenant to continue this old custom, but I can ask you to reconsider your
      decision.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Will you forgive me for saying that you are so exactly the person I
      should like to see in the house that I feel I can not give you up? So
      strongly do I feel this that I would, if I dared, enclose your check and
      beg you to use the house rent free. Faithfully yours, Emily Benton."
    </p>
    <p>
      Gracefully worded and carefully written as the letter was, I seemed to
      feel behind it some stress of feeling, an excitement perhaps, totally out
      of proportion to its contents. Years before I had met Miss Emily, even
      then a frail little old lady, her small figure stiffly erect, her eyes
      cold, her whole bearing one of reserve. The Bentons, for all their open
      doors, were known in that part of the country as "proud." I can remember,
      too, how when I was a young girl my mother had regarded the rare
      invitations to have tea and tiny cakes in the Benton parlor as commands,
      no less, and had taken the long carriage-ride from the city with
      complacency. And now Miss Emily, last of the family, had begged me to take
      the house.
    </p>
    <p>
      In the end, as has been shown, I agreed. The glamor of the past had
      perhaps something to do with it. But I have come to a time of life when,
      failing intimate interests of my own, my neighbors' interests are mine by
      adoption. To be frank, I came because I was curious. Why, aside from a
      money consideration, was the Benton house to be occupied by an alien
      household? It was opposed to every tradition of the family as I had heard
      of it.
    </p>
    <p>
      I knew something of the family history: the Reverend Thaddeus Benton,
      rector of Saint Bartholomew, who had forsaken the frame rectory near the
      church to build himself the substantial home now being offered me; Miss
      Emily, his daughter, who must now, I computed, be nearly seventy; and a
      son whom I recalled faintly as hardly bearing out the Benton traditions of
      solidity and rectitude.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Reverend Mr. Benton, I recalled, had taken the stand that his house
      was his own, and having moved his family into it, had thereafter, save on
      great occasions, received the congregation individually or en masse, in
      his study at the church. A patriarchal old man, benevolent yet austere,
      who once, according to a story I had heard in my girlhood, had
      horsewhipped one of his vestrymen for trifling with the affections of a
      young married woman in the village!
    </p>
    <p>
      There was a gap of thirty years in my knowledge of the family. I had,
      indeed, forgotten its very existence, when by the chance of a newspaper
      advertisement I found myself involved vitally in its affairs, playing
      providence, indeed, and both fearing and hating my role. Looking back,
      there are a number of things that appear rather curious. Why, for
      instance, did Maggie, my old servant, develop such a dislike for the
      place? It had nothing to do with the house. She had not seen it when she
      first refused to go. But her reluctance was evident from the beginning.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I've just got a feeling about it, Miss Agnes," she said. "I can't explain
      it, any more than I can explain a cold in the head. But it's there."
    </p>
    <p>
      At first I was inclined to blame Maggie's "feeling" on her knowledge that
      the house was cheap. She knew it, as she has, I am sure, read all my
      letters for years. She has a distrust of a bargain. But later I came to
      believe that there was something more to Maggie's distrust&mdash;as though
      perhaps a wave of uneasiness, spreading from some unknown source, had
      engulfed her.
    </p>
    <p>
      Indeed, looking back over the two months I spent in the Benton house, I am
      inclined to go even further. If thoughts carry, as I am sure they do, then
      emotions carry. Fear, hope, courage, despair&mdash;if the intention of
      writing a letter to an absent friend can spread itself half-way across the
      earth, so that as you write the friend writes also, and your letters
      cross, how much more should big emotions carry? I have had sweep over me
      such waves of gladness, such gusts of despair, as have shaken me. Yet with
      no cause for either. They are gone in a moment. Just for an instant, I
      have caught and made my own another's joy or grief.
    </p>
    <p>
      The only inexplicable part of this narrative is that Maggie, neither a
      psychic nor a sensitive type, caught the terror, as I came to call it,
      before I did. Perhaps it may be explainable by the fact that her mental
      processes are comparatively simple, her mind an empty slate that shows
      every mark made on it.
    </p>
    <p>
      In a way, this is a study in fear.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie's resentment continued through my decision to use the house,
      through the packing, through the very moving itself. It took the form of a
      sort of watchful waiting, although at the time we neither of us realized
      it, and of dislike of the house and its surroundings. It extended itself
      to the very garden, where she gathered flowers for the table with a
      ruthlessness that was almost vicious. And, as July went on, and Miss Emily
      made her occasional visits, as tiny, as delicate as herself, I had a
      curious conclusion forced on me. Miss Emily returned her antagonism. I was
      slow to credit it. What secret and even unacknowledged opposition could
      there be between my downright Maggie and this little old aristocrat with
      her frail hands and the soft rustle of silk about her?
    </p>
    <p>
      In Miss Emily, it took the form of&mdash;how strange a word to use in
      connection with her!&mdash;of furtive watchfulness. I felt that Maggie's
      entrance, with nothing more momentous than the tea-tray, set her upright
      in her chair, put an edge to her soft voice, and absorbed her. She was
      still attentive to what I said. She agreed or dissented. But back of it
      all, with her eyes on me, she was watching Maggie.
    </p>
    <p>
      With Maggie the antagonism took no such subtle form. It showed itself in
      the second best instead of the best china, and a tendency to weak tea,
      when Miss Emily took hers very strong. And such was the effect of their
      mutual watchfulness and suspicion, such perhaps was the influence of the
      staid old house on me, after a time even that fact, of the strong tea,
      began to strike me as incongruous. Miss Emily was so consistent, so
      consistently frail and dainty and so&mdash;well, unspotted seems to be the
      word&mdash;and so gentle, yet as time went on I began to feel that she
      hated Maggie with a real hatred. And there was the strong tea!
    </p>
    <p>
      Indeed, it was not quite normal, nor was I. For by that time&mdash;the
      middle of July it was before I figured out as much as I have set down in
      five minutes&mdash;by that time I was not certain about the house. It was
      difficult to say just what I felt about the house. Willie, who came down
      over a Sunday early in the summer, possibly voiced it when he came down to
      his breakfast there.
    </p>
    <p>
      "How did you sleep?" I asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Not very well." He picked up his coffee-cup, and smiled over it rather
      sheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to thinking about things&mdash;the
      furniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many people have sat in the
      chairs and seen themselves in the mirror and died in the bed, and so on."
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie, who was bringing in the toast, gave a sort of low moan, which she
      turned into a cough.
    </p>
    <p>
      "There have been twenty-three deaths in it in the last forty years, Mr.
      Willie," she volunteered. "That's according to the gardener. And more than
      half died in that room of yours."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Put down that toast before you drop it, Maggie," I said. "You're shaking
      all over. And go out and shut the door."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Very well," she said, with a meekness behind which she was both indignant
      and frightened. "But there is one word I might mention before I go, and
      that is&mdash;cats!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Cats!" said Willie, as she slammed the door.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think it is only one cat," I observed mildly. "It belongs to Miss
      Emily, I fancy. It manages to be in a lot of places nearly simultaneously,
      and Maggie swears it is a dozen."
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie is not subtle. He is a practical young man with a growing family,
      and a tendency the last year or two to flesh. But he ate his breakfast
      thoughtfully.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Don't you think it's rather isolated?" he asked finally. "Just you three
      women here?" I had taken Delia, the cook, along.
    </p>
    <p>
      "We have a telephone," I said, rather loftily. "Although&mdash;" I checked
      myself. Maggie, I felt sure, was listening in the pantry, and I intended
      to give her wild fancies no encouragement. To utter a thing is, to Maggie,
      to give it life. By the mere use of the spoken word it ceases to be
      supposition and becomes fact.
    </p>
    <p>
      As a matter of fact, my uneasiness about the house resolved itself into an
      uneasiness about the telephone. It seems less absurd now than it did then.
      But I remember what Willie said about it that morning on our way to the
      church.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It rings at night, Willie," I said. "And when I go there is no one
      there."
    </p>
    <p>
      "So do all telephones," he replied briskly. "It's their greatest
      weakness."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Once or twice we have found the thing on the floor in the morning. It
      couldn't blow over or knock itself down."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Probably the cat," he said, with the patient air of a man arguing with an
      unreasonable woman. "Of course," he added&mdash;we were passing the
      churchyard then, dominated by what the village called the Benton "mosolem"&mdash;"there's
      a chance that those dead-and-gone Bentons resent anything as modern as a
      telephone. It might be interesting to see what they would do to a
      victrola."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'm going to tell you something, Willie," I said. "I am afraid of the
      telephone."
    </p>
    <p>
      He was completely incredulous. I felt rather ridiculous, standing there in
      the sunlight of that summer Sabbath and making my confession. But I did
      it.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I am afraid of it," I repeated. "I'm desperately sure you will never
      understand. Because I don't. I can hardly force myself to go to it. I hate
      the very back corner of the hall where it stands, I&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      I saw his expression then, and I stopped, furious with myself. Why had I
      said it? But more important still, why did I feel it? I had not put it
      into words before, I had not expected to say it then. But the moment I
      said it I knew it was true. I had developed an idee fixe.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, rather feebly.
      "It's on my nerves, I think."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice. "It
      doesn't sound like you. A telephone!" But just at the church door he
      stopped me, a hand on my arm.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Look here," he said, "don't you suppose it's because you're so dependent
      on the telephone? You know that if anything goes wrong with it, you're cut
      off, in a way. And there's another point&mdash;you get all your news over
      it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I think, in finding the words he
      wanted. "It's&mdash;it's vital," he said. "So you attach too much
      importance to it, and it gets to be an obsession."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Very likely," I assented. "The whole thing is idiotic, anyhow."
    </p>
    <p>
      But&mdash;was it idiotic?
    </p>
    <p>
      I am endeavoring to set things down as they seemed to me at the time, not
      in the light of subsequent events. For, if this narrative has any interest
      at all, it is a psychological one. I have said that it is a study in fear,
      but perhaps it would be more accurate to say that it is a study of the
      mental reaction of crime, of its effects on different minds, more or less
      remotely connected with it.
    </p>
    <p>
      That my analysis of my impressions in the church that morning are not
      colored by subsequent events is proved by the fact that under cover of
      that date, July 16th, I made the following entry:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why do Maggie and Miss Benton distrust each other?"
    </p>
    <p>
      I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as is
      evidenced by the fact that I follow it with a recipe for fruit gelatin,
      copied from the newspaper.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was a calm and sunny Sunday morning. The church windows were wide open,
      and a butterfly came in and set the choir boys to giggling. At the end of
      my pew a stained-glass window to Carlo Benton&mdash;the name came like an
      echo from the forgotten past&mdash;sent a shower of colored light over
      Willie, turned my blue silk to most unspinsterly hues, and threw a sort of
      summer radiance over Miss Emily herself, in the seat ahead.
    </p>
    <p>
      She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile. She was so
      orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of her hand-sewed organdy collar was
      so clearly identical with every other, her very seams, if you can
      understand it, ran so exactly where they should, that she set me to
      pulling myself straight. I am rather casual as to seams.
    </p>
    <p>
      After a time I began to have a curious feeling about her. Her head was
      toward the rector, standing in a sort of white nimbus of sunlight, but I
      felt that Miss Emily's entire attention was on our pew, immediately behind
      her. I find I can not put it into words, unless it was that her back
      settled into more rigid lines. I glanced along the pew. Willie's face wore
      a calm and slightly somnolent expression. But Maggie, in her far end&mdash;she
      is very high church and always attends&mdash;Maggie's eyes were glued
      almost fiercely to Miss Emily's back. And just then Miss Emily herself
      stirred, glanced up at the window, and turning slightly, returned Maggie's
      glance with one almost as malevolent. I have hesitated over that word. It
      seems strong now, but at the time it was the one that came into my mind.
    </p>
    <p>
      When it was over, it was hard to believe that it had happened. And even
      now, with everything else clear, I do not pretend to explain Maggie's
      attitude. She knew, in some strange way. But she did not know that she
      knew&mdash;which sounds like nonsense and is as near as I can come to
      getting it down in words.
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie left that night, the 16th, and we settled down to quiet days, and,
      for a time, to undisturbed nights. But on the following Wednesday, by my
      journal, the telephone commenced to bother me again. Generally speaking,
      it rang rather early, between eleven o'clock and midnight. But on the
      following Saturday night I find I have recorded the hour as 2 a.m.
    </p>
    <p>
      In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never rang
      the second time. When I went downstairs to answer it&mdash;I did not
      always go&mdash;there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing
      else. It was on the twenty-fourth that I had the telephone inspected and
      reported in normal condition, and it is possibly significant that for
      three days afterward my record shows not a single disturbance.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "D'you mind if I turn the bed down now, Miss Agnes?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's very early."
    </p>
    <p>
      "S'almost eight." When she is nervous she cuts verbal corners.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You know perfectly well that I dislike having the beds disturbed until
      nine o'clock, Maggie."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'm going out."
    </p>
    <p>
      "You said that last night, but you didn't go."
    </p>
    <p>
      Silence.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of&mdash;" I
      hesitated&mdash;"of fear. When you have really seen or heard something, it
      will be time enough to be nervous."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Humph!" said Maggie on one of these occasions, and edged into the room.
      It was growing dusk. "It will be too late then, Miss Agnes. And another
      thing. You're a brave woman. I don't know as I've seen a braver. But I
      notice you keep away from the telephone after dark."
    </p>
    <p>
      The general outcome of these conversations was that, to avoid argument, I
      permitted the preparation of my room for the night at an earlier and yet
      earlier hour, until at last it was done the moment I was dressed for
      dinner.
    </p>
    <p>
      It is clear to me now that two entirely different sorts of fear actuated
      us. For by that time I had to acknowledge that there was fear in the
      house. Even Delia, the cook, had absorbed some of Maggie's terror;
      possibly traceable to some early impressions of death which connected
      them-selves with a four-post bedstead.
    </p>
    <p>
      Of the two sorts of fear, Delia's and Maggie's symptoms were subjective.
      Mine, I still feel, were objective.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was not long before the beginning of August, and during a lull in the
      telephone matter, that I began to suspect that the house was being visited
      at night.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was nothing I could point to with any certainty as having been
      disturbed at first. It was a matter of a book misplaced on the table, of
      my sewing-basket open when I always leave it closed, of a burnt match on
      the floor, whereas it is one of my orderly habits never to leave burnt
      matches around. And at last the burnt match became a sort of clue, for I
      suspected that it had been used to light one of the candles that sat in
      holders of every sort, on the top of the library shelves.
    </p>
    <p>
      I tried getting up at night and peering over the banisters, but without
      result. And I was never sure as to articles that they had been moved. I
      remained in that doubting and suspicious halfway ground that is worse than
      certainty. And there was the matter of motive. I could not get away from
      that. What possible purpose could an intruder have, for instance, in
      opening my sewing-basket or moving the dictionary two inches on the center
      table?
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet the feeling persisted, and on the second of August I find this entry
      in my journal:
    </p>
    <p>
      Right-hand brass, eight inches; left-hand brass, seven inches; carved-wood&mdash;Italian&mdash;five
      and three quarter inches each; old glass on mantelpiece&mdash;seven
      inches. And below this, dated the third: Last night, between midnight and
      daylight, the candle in the glass holder on the right side of the mantel
      was burned down one and one-half inches.
    </p>
    <p>
      I should, no doubt, have set a watch on my nightly visitor after making
      this discovery&mdash;and one that was apparently connected with it&mdash;nothing
      less than Delia's report that there were candle-droppings over the border
      of the library carpet. But I have admitted that this is a study in fear,
      and a part of it is my own.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was afraid. I was afraid of the night visitor, but, more than that, I
      was afraid of the fear. It had become a real thing by that time, something
      that lurked in the lower back hall waiting to catch me by the throat, to
      stop my breath, to paralyze me so I could not escape. I never went beyond
      that point.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet I am not a cowardly woman. I have lived alone too long for that. I
      have closed too many houses at night and gone upstairs in the dark to be
      afraid of darkness. And even now I can not, looking back, admit that I was
      afraid of the darkness there, although I resorted to the weak expedient of
      leaving a short length of candle to burn itself out in the hall when I
      went up to bed.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have seen one of Willie's boys waken up at night screaming with a terror
      he could not describe. Well, it was much like that with me, except that I
      was awake and horribly ashamed of myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the fourth of August I find in my journal the single word "flour." It
      recalls both my own cowardice at that time, and an experiment I made. The
      telephone had not bothered us for several nights, and I began to suspect a
      connection of this sort: when the telephone rang, there was no night
      visitor, and vice versa. I was not certain.
    </p>
    <p>
      Delia was setting bread that night in the kitchen, and Maggie was reading
      a ghost story from the evening paper. There was a fine sifting of flour
      over the table, and it gave me my idea. When I went up to bed that night,
      I left a powdering of flour here and there on the lower floor, at the door
      into the library, a patch by the table, and&mdash;going back rather
      uneasily&mdash;one near the telephone.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was up and downstairs before Maggie the next morning. The patches showed
      trampling. In the doorway they were almost obliterated, as by the trailing
      of a garment over them, but by the fireplace there were two prints quite
      distinct. I knew when I saw them that I had expected the marks of Miss
      Emily's tiny foot, although I had not admitted it before. But these were
      not Miss Emily's. They were large, flat, substantial, and one showed a
      curious marking around the edge that&mdash;It was my own! The marking was
      the knitted side of my bedroom slipper. I had, so far as I could tell,
      gone downstairs, in the night, investigated the candles, possibly in
      darkness, and gone back to bed again.
    </p>
    <p>
      The effect of the discovery on me was&mdash;well undermining. In all the
      uneasiness of the past few weeks I had at least had full confidence in
      myself. And now that was gone. I began to wonder how much of the things
      that had troubled me were real, and how many I had made for myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      To tell the truth, by that time the tension was almost unbearable. My
      nerves were going, and there was no reason for it. I kept telling myself
      that. In the mirror I looked white and anxious, and I had a sense of
      approaching trouble. I caught Maggie watching me, too, and on the seventh
      I find in my journal the words: "Insanity is often only a formless
      terror."
    </p>
    <p>
      On the Sunday morning following that I found three burnt matches in the
      library fireplace, and one of the candles in the brass holders was almost
      gone. I sat most of the day in that room, wondering what would happen to
      me if I lost my mind. I knew that Maggie was watching me, and I made one
      of those absurd hypotheses to myself that we all do at times. If any of
      the family came, I would know that she had sent for them, and that I was
      really deranged! It had been a long day, with a steady summer rain that
      had not cooled the earth, but only set it steaming. The air was like hot
      vapor, and my hair clung to my moist forehead. At about four o'clock
      Maggie started chasing a fly with a folded newspaper. She followed it
      about the lower floor from room to room, making little harsh noises in her
      throat when she missed it. The sound of the soft thud of the paper on
      walls and furniture seemed suddenly more than I could bear.
    </p>
    <p>
      "For heaven's sake!" I cried. "Stop that noise, Maggie." I felt as though
      my eyes were starting from my head.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's a fly," she said doggedly, and aimed another blow at it. "If I don't
      kill it, we'll have a million. There, it's on the mantel now. I never&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      I felt that if she raised the paper club once more I should scream. So I
      got up quickly and caught her wrist. She was so astonished that she let
      the paper drop, and there we stood, staring at each other. I can still see
      the way her mouth hung open.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Don't!" I said. And my voice sounded thick even to my own ears. "Maggie&mdash;I
      can't stand it!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "My God, Miss Agnes!"
    </p>
    <p>
      Her tone brought me up sharply. I released her arm.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I&mdash;I'm just nervous, Maggie," I said, and sat down. I was trembling
      violently.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was sane. I knew it then as I know it now. But I was not rational.
      Perhaps to most of us come now and then times when they realize that some
      act, or some thought, is not balanced, as though, for a moment or an hour,
      the control was gone from the brain. Or&mdash;and I think this was the
      feeling I had&mdash;that some other control was in charge. Not the Agnes
      Blakiston I knew, but another Agnes Blakiston, perhaps, was exerting a
      temporary dominance, a hectic, craven, and hateful control.
    </p>
    <p>
      That is the only outburst I recall. Possibly Maggie may have others stored
      away. She has a tenacious memory. Certainly it was my nearest approach to
      violence. But it had the effect of making me set a watch on myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      Possibly it was coincidence. Probably, however, Maggie had communicated
      with Willie. But two days later young Martin Sprague, Freda Sprague's son,
      stopped his car in the drive and came in. He is a nerve specialist, and
      very good, although I can remember when he came down in his night drawers
      to one of his mother's dinner-parties.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Thought I would just run in and see you," he said. "Mother told me you
      were here. By George, Miss Agnes, you look younger than ever."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Who told you to come, Martie?" I asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Told me? I don't have to be told to visit an old friend."
    </p>
    <p>
      Well, he asked himself to lunch, and looked over the house, and decided to
      ask Miss Emily if she would sell an old Japanese cabinet inlaid with
      mother of pearl that I would not have had as a gift. And, in the end, I
      told him my trouble, of the fear that seemed to center around the
      telephone, and the sleep-walking.
    </p>
    <p>
      He listened carefully.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Ever get any bad news over the telephone?" he asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      One way and another, I said I had had plenty of it. He went over me
      thoroughly, and was inclined to find my experience with the flour rather
      amusing than otherwise. "It's rather good, that," he said. "Setting a trap
      to catch yourself. You'd better have Maggie sleep in your room for a
      while. Well, it's all pretty plain, Miss Agnes. We bury some things as
      deep as possible, especially if we don't want to remember that they ever
      happened. But the mind's a queer thing. It holds on pretty hard, and
      burying is not destroying. Then we get tired or nervous&mdash;maybe just
      holding the thing down and pretending it is not there makes us nervous&mdash;and
      up it pops, like the ghost of a buried body, and raises hell. You don't
      mind that, do you?" he added anxiously. "It's exactly what those things do
      raise."
    </p>
    <p>
      "But," I demanded irritably, "who rings the telephone at night? I daresay
      you don't contend that I go out at night and call the house, and then come
      back and answer the call, do you?"
    </p>
    <p>
      He looked at me with a maddening smile.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Are you sure it really rings?" he asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      And so bad was my nervous condition by that time, so undermined was my
      self-confidence, that I was not certain! And this in face of the fact that
      it invariably roused Maggie as well as myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the eleventh of August Miss Emily came to tea. The date does not
      matter, but by following the chronology of my journal I find I can keep my
      narrative in proper sequence.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had felt better that day. So far as I could determine, I had not walked
      in my sleep again, and there was about Maggie an air of cheerfulness and
      relief which showed that my condition was more nearly normal than it had
      been for some time. The fear of the telephone and of the back hall was
      leaving me, too. Perhaps Martin Sprague's matter-of-fact explanation had
      helped me. But my own theory had always been the one I recorded at the
      beginning of this narrative&mdash;that I caught and&mdash;well, registered
      is a good word&mdash;that I registered an overwhelming fear from some
      unknown source.
    </p>
    <p>
      I spied Miss Emily as she got out of the hack that day, a cool little
      figure clad in a thin black silk dress, with the sheerest possible white
      collars and cuffs. Her small bonnet with its crepe veil was faced with
      white, and her carefully crimped gray hair showed a wavy border beneath
      it. Mr. Staley, the station hackman, helped her out of the surrey, and
      handed her the knitting-bag without which she was seldom seen. It was two
      weeks since she had been there, and she came slowly up the walk, looking
      from side to side at the perennial borders, then in full August bloom.
    </p>
    <p>
      She smiled when she saw me in the doorway, and said, with the little
      anxious pucker between her eyes that was so childish, "Don't you think
      peonies are better cut down at this time of year?" She took a folded
      handkerchief from her bag and dabbed at her face, where there was no sign
      of dust to mar its old freshness. "It gives the lilies a better chance, my
      dear."
    </p>
    <p>
      I led her into the house, and she produced a gay bit of knitting, a baby
      afghan, by the signs. She smiled at me over it.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I am always one baby behind," she explained and fell to work rapidly. She
      had lovely hands, and I suspected them of being her one vanity.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie was serving tea with her usual grudging reluctance, and I noticed
      then that when she was in the room Miss Emily said little or nothing. I
      thought it probable that she did not approve of conversing before
      servants, and would have let it go at that, had I not, as I held out Miss
      Emily's cup, caught her looking at Maggie. I had a swift impression of
      antagonism again, of alertness and something more. When Maggie went out,
      Miss Emily turned to me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She is very capable, I fancy."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Very. Entirely too capable."
    </p>
    <p>
      "She looks sharp," said Miss Emily. It was a long time since I had heard
      the word so used, but it was very apt. Maggie was indeed sharp. But Miss
      Emily launched into a general dissertation on servants, and Maggie's
      sharpness was forgotten.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was, I think, when she was about to go that I asked her about the
      telephone.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Telephone?" she inquired. "Why, no. It has always done very well. Of
      course, after a heavy snow in the winter, sometimes&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      She had a fashion of leaving her sentences unfinished. They trailed off,
      without any abrupt break.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It rings at night."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Rings?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I am called frequently and when I get to the phone, there is no one
      there."
    </p>
    <p>
      Some of my irritation doubtless got into my voice, for Miss Emily suddenly
      drew away and stared at me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "But&mdash;that is very strange. I&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      She had gone pale. I saw that now. And quite suddenly she dropped her
      knitting-bag. When I restored it to her, she was very calm and poised, but
      her color had not come back.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It has always been very satisfactory," she said. "I don't know that it
      ever&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      She considered, and began again. "Why not just ignore it? If some one is
      playing a malicious trick on you, the only thing is to ignore it."
    </p>
    <p>
      Her hands were shaking, although her voice was quiet. I saw that when she
      tried to tie the ribbons of the bag. And&mdash;I wondered at this, in so
      gentle a soul&mdash;there was a hint of anger in her tones. There was an
      edge to her voice.
    </p>
    <p>
      That she could be angry was a surprise. And I found that she could also be
      obstinate. For we came to an impasse over the telephone in the next few
      minutes, and over something so absurd that I was non-plussed. It was over
      her unqualified refusal to allow me to install a branch wire to my
      bedroom.
    </p>
    <p>
      "But," I expostulated, "when one thinks of the convenience, and&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I am sorry." Her voice had a note of finality. "I daresay I am
      old-fashioned, but&mdash;I do not like changes. I shall have to ask you
      not to interfere with the telephone."
    </p>
    <p>
      I could hardly credit my senses. Her tone was one of reproof, plus
      decision. It convicted me of an indiscretion. If I had asked to take the
      roof off and replace it with silk umbrellas, it might have been justified.
      But to a request to move the telephone!
    </p>
    <p>
      "Of course, if you feel that way about it," I said, "I shall not touch
      it."
    </p>
    <p>
      I dropped the subject, a trifle ruffled, I confess, and went upstairs to
      fetch a box in which Miss Emily was to carry away some flowers from the
      garden.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was when I was coming down the staircase that I saw Maggie. She had
      carried the hall candlesticks, newly polished, to their places on the
      table, and was standing, a hand on each one, staring into the old
      Washington mirror in front of her. From where she was she must have had a
      full view of Miss Emily in the library. And Maggie was bristling. It was
      the only word for it.
    </p>
    <p>
      She was still there when Miss Emily had gone, blowing on the mirror and
      polishing it. And I took her to task for her unfriendly attitude to the
      little old lady.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You practically threw her muffins at her," I said. "And I must speak
      again about the cups&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "What does she come snooping around for, anyhow?" she broke in. "Aren't we
      paying for her house? Didn't she get down on her bended knees and beg us
      to take it?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Is that any reason why we should be uncivil?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "What I want to know is this," Maggie said truculently. "What right has
      she to come back, and spy on us? For that's what she's doing, Miss Agnes.
      Do you know what she was at when I looked in at her? She was running a
      finger along the baseboard to see if it was clean! And what's more, I
      caught her at it once before, in the back hall, when she was pretending to
      telephone for the station hack."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was that day, I think, that I put fresh candles in all the holders
      downstairs. I had made a resolution like this,&mdash;to renew the candles,
      and to lock myself in my room and throw the key over the transom to
      Maggie. If, in the mornings that followed, the candles had been used, it
      would prove that Martin Sprague was wrong, that even foot-prints could
      lie, and that some one was investigating the lower floor at night. For
      while my reason told me that I had been the intruder, my intuition
      continued to insist that my sleepwalking was a result, not a cause. In a
      word, I had gone downstairs, because I knew that there had been and might
      be again, a night visitor.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet, there was something of comedy in that night's precautions, after all.
    </p>
    <p>
      At ten-thirty I was undressed, and Maggie had, with rebellion in every
      line of her, locked me in. I could hear her, afterwards running along the
      hall to her own room and slamming the door. Then, a moment later, the
      telephone rang.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      And Maggie would not let me out!
    </p>
    <p>
      "You're not going downstairs," she called, from a safe distance.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Maggie!" I cried, sharply. And banged at the door. The telephone was
      ringing steadily. "Come here at once."
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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&mdash;and proved to be the eyes of Miss Emily's cat, which
      had been sleeping on the stand!
    </p>
    <p>
      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:
    </p>
    <p>
      "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."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I do not want to influence you. I want you to do just what you think
      best."
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      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.
    </p>
    <p>
      So at last I fetched the shawl from the rack and made him a bed on the
      stand. It was what he had been waiting for. I saw that at once. He walked
      onto it, turned around once, lay down, and closed his eyes.
    </p>
    <p>
      I took up my vigil. I had been the victim of a fear I was determined to
      conquer. The house was quiet. Maggie had retired shriveled to bed. The cat
      slept on the shawl.
    </p>
    <p>
      And then&mdash;I felt the fear returning. It welled up through my
      tranquillity like a flood, and swept me with it. I wanted to shriek. I was
      afraid to shriek. I longed to escape. I dared not move. There had been no
      sound, no motion. Things were as they had been.
    </p>
    <p>
      It may have been one minute or five that I sat there. I do not know. I
      only know that I sat with fixed eyes, not even blinking, for fear of even
      for a second shutting out the sane and visible world about me. A sense of
      deadness commenced in my hands and worked up my arms. My chest seemed
      flattened.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then the telephone bell rang.
    </p>
    <p>
      The cat leaped to his feet. Somehow I reached forward and took down the
      receiver.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Who is it?" I cried, in a voice that was thin, I knew, and unnatural.
    </p>
    <p>
      The telephone is not a perfect medium. It loses much that we wish to
      register but, also, it registers much that we may wish to lose. Therefore
      when I say that I distinctly heard a gasp, followed by heavy difficult
      breathing, over the telephone, I must beg for credence. It is true. Some
      one at the other end of the line was struggling for breath.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then there was complete silence. I realized, after a moment, that the
      circuit had been stealthily cut, and that my conviction was verified by
      Central's demand, a moment later, of what number I wanted. I was, at
      first, unable to answer her. When I did speak, my voice was shaken.
    </p>
    <p>
      "What number, please?" she repeated, in a bored tone. There is nothing in
      all the world so bored as the voice of a small town telephone-operator.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You called," I said.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Beg y'pardon. Must have been a mistake," she replied glibly, and cut me
      off.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0002" id="link2H_4_0002">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      II
    </h2>
    <p>
      It may be said, and with truth, that so far I have recorded little but
      subjective terror, possibly easily explained by my occupancy of an
      isolated house, plus a few unimportant incidents, capable of various
      interpretations. But the fear was, and is today as I look back, a real
      thing. As real&mdash;and as difficult to describe&mdash;as a chill, for
      instance. A severe mental chill it was, indeed.
    </p>
    <p>
      I went upstairs finally to a restless night, and rose early, after only an
      hour or so of sleep. One thing I was determined on&mdash;to find out, if
      possible, the connection between the terror and the telephone. I
      breakfasted early, and was dressing to go to the village when I had a
      visitor, no other than Miss Emily herself. She looked fluttered and
      perturbed at the unceremonious hour of her visit&mdash;she was the soul of
      convention&mdash;and explained, between breaths as it were, that she had
      come to apologize for the day before. She had hardly slept. I must forgive
      her. She had been very nervous since her brother's death, and small things
      upset her.
    </p>
    <p>
      How much of what I say of Miss Emily depends on my later knowledge, I
      wonder? Did I notice then that she was watching me furtively, or is it
      only on looking back that I recall it? I do recall it&mdash;the hall door
      open and a vista of smiling garden beyond, and silhouetted against the
      sunshine, Miss Emily's frail figure and searching, slightly uplifted face.
      There was something in her eyes that I had not seen before&mdash;a sort of
      exaltation. She was not, that morning, the Miss Emily who ran a finger
      along her baseboards to see if we dusted them.
    </p>
    <p>
      She had walked out, and it had exhausted her. She breathed in little
      gasps.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think," she said at last, "that I must telephone for Mr. Staley, I am
      never very strong in hot weather."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Please let me call him, for you, Miss Emily." I am not a young woman, and
      she was at least sixty-five. But, because she was so small and frail, I
      felt almost a motherly anxiety for her that morning.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think I should like to do it, if you don't mind. We are old friends. He
      always comes promptly when I call him."
    </p>
    <p>
      She went back alone, and I waited in the doorway. When she came out, she
      was smiling, and there was more color in her face.
    </p>
    <p>
      "He is coming at once. He is always very thoughtful for me."
    </p>
    <p>
      Now, without any warning, something that had been seething since her
      breathless arrival took shape in my mind, and became&mdash;suspicion. What
      if it had been Miss Emily who had called me the second time to the
      telephone, and having established the connection, had waited, breathing
      hard for&mdash;what?
    </p>
    <p>
      It was fantastic, incredible in the light of that brilliant summer day. I
      looked at her, dainty and exquisite as ever, her ruchings fresh and white,
      her very face indicative of decorum and order, her wistful old mouth still
      rather like a child's, her eyes, always slightly upturned because of her
      diminutive height, so that she had habitually a look of adoration.
    </p>
    <p>
      "One of earth's saints," the rector had said to me on Sunday morning. "A
      good woman, Miss Blakiston, and a sacrifice to an unworthy family."
    </p>
    <p>
      Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust. And
      that morning I began to suspect Miss Emily. I had no idea of what.
    </p>
    <p>
      On my mentioning an errand in the village she promptly offered to take me
      with her in the Staley hack. She had completely altered in manner. The
      strain was gone. In her soft low voice, as we made our way to the road,
      she told me the stories of some of the garden flowers.
    </p>
    <p>
      "The climbing rose over the arch, my dear," she said, "my mother brought
      from England on her wedding journey. People have taken cuttings from it
      again and again, but the cuttings never thrive. A bad winter, and they are
      gone. But this one has lived. Of course now and then it freezes down."
    </p>
    <p>
      She chattered on, and my suspicions grew more and more shadowy. They would
      have gone, I think, had not Maggie called me back with a grocery list.
    </p>
    <p>
      "A sack of flour," she said, "and some green vegetables, and&mdash;Miss
      Agnes, that woman was down on her knees beside the telephone!&mdash;and
      bluing for the laundry, and I guess that's all."
    </p>
    <p>
      The telephone! It was always the telephone. We drove on down the lane,
      eyed somnolently by spotted cows and incurious sheep, and all the way Miss
      Emily talked. She was almost garrulous. She asked the hackman about his
      family and stopped the vehicle to pick up a peddler, overburdened with his
      pack. I watched her with amazement. Evidently this was Mr. Staley's Miss
      Emily. But it was not mine.
    </p>
    <p>
      But I saw mine, too, that morning. It was when I asked the hackman to put
      me down at the little telephone building. I thought she put her hand to
      her throat, although the next moment she was only adjusting the ruching at
      her neck.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You&mdash;you have decided to have the second telephone put in, then?"
    </p>
    <p>
      I hesitated. She so obviously did not want it installed. And was I to
      submit meekly to the fear again, without another effort to vanquish it?
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think not, dear Miss Emily," I said at last, smiling at her drawn face.
      "Why should I disturb your lovely old house and its established order?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "But I want you to do just what you think best," she protested. She had
      put her hands together. It was almost a supplication.
    </p>
    <p>
      As to the strange night calls, there was little to be learned. The night
      operator was in bed. The manager made a note of my complaint, and promised
      an investigation, which, having had experience with telephone
      investigations, I felt would lead nowhere. I left the building, with my
      grocery list in my hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      The hack was gone, of course. But&mdash;I may have imagined it&mdash;I
      thought I saw Miss Emily peering at me from behind the bonnets and hats in
      the milliner's window.
    </p>
    <p>
      I did not investigate. The thing was enough on my nerves as it was.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie served me my luncheon in a sort of strained silence. She observed
      once, as she brought me my tea, that she was giving me notice and intended
      leaving on the afternoon train. She had, she stated, holding out the
      sugar-bowl to me at arm's length, stood a great deal in the way of
      irregular hours from me, seeing as I would read myself to sleep, and let
      the light burn all night, although very fussy about the gas-bills. But she
      had reached the end of her tether, and you could grate a lemon on her most
      anywhere, she was that covered with goose-flesh.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Goose-flesh about what?" I demanded. "And either throw the sugar to me or
      come closer."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I don't know about what," she said sullenly. "I'm just scared."
    </p>
    <p>
      And for once Maggie and I were in complete harmony. I, too, was "just
      scared."
    </p>
    <p>
      We were, however, both of us much nearer a solution of our troubles than
      we had any idea of. I say solution, although it but substituted one
      mystery for another. It gave tangibility to the intangible, indeed, but I
      can not see that our situation was any better. I, for one, found myself in
      the position of having a problem to solve, and no formula to solve it
      with.
    </p>
    <p>
      The afternoon was quiet. Maggie and the cook were in the throes of
      jelly-making, and I had picked up a narrative history of the county,
      written most pedantically, although with here and there a touch of heavy
      lightness, by Miss Emily's father, the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus Benton.
    </p>
    <p>
      On the fly-leaf she had inscribed, "Written by my dear father during the
      last year of his life, and published after his death by the parish to
      which he had given so much of his noble life."
    </p>
    <p>
      The book left me cold, but the inscription warmed me. Whatever feeling I
      might have had about Miss Emily died of that inscription. A devoted and
      self-sacrificing daughter, a woman both loving and beloved, that was the
      Miss Emily of the dedication to "Fifty years in Bolivar County."
    </p>
    <p>
      In the middle of the afternoon Maggie appeared, with a saucer and a
      teaspoon. In the saucer she had poured a little of the jelly to test it,
      and she was blowing on it when she entered. I put down my book.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Well!" I said. "Don't tell me you're not dressed yet. You've just got
      about time for the afternoon train."
    </p>
    <p>
      She gave me an imploring glance over the saucer.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You might just take a look at this, Miss Agnes," she said. "It jells
      around the edges, but in the middle&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'll send your trunk tomorrow," I said, "and you'd better let Delia make
      the jelly alone. You haven't much time, and she says she makes good
      jelly."
    </p>
    <p>
      She raised anguished eyes to mine.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Miss Agnes," she said, "that woman's never made a glass of jelly in her
      life before. She didn't even know about putting a silver spoon in the
      tumblers to keep 'em from breaking."
    </p>
    <p>
      I picked up "Bolivar County" and opened it, but I could see that the hands
      holding the saucer were shaking.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'm not going, Miss Agnes," said Maggie. (I had, of course, known she
      would not. The surprising thing to me is that she never learns this fact,
      although she gives me notice quite regularly. She always thinks that she
      is really going, until the last.) "Of course you can let that woman make
      the jelly, if you want. It's your fruit and sugar. But I'm not going to
      desert you in your hour of need."
    </p>
    <p>
      "What do I need?" I demanded. "Jelly?"
    </p>
    <p>
      But she was past sarcasm. She placed the saucer on a table and rolled her
      stained hands in her apron.
    </p>
    <p>
      "That woman," she said, "what was she doing under the telephone stand?"
    </p>
    <p>
      She almost immediately burst into tears, and it was some time before I
      caught what she feared. For she was more concrete than I. And she knew now
      what she was afraid of. It was either a bomb or fire.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Mark my words, Miss Agnes," she said, "she's going to destroy the place.
      What made her set out and rent it for almost nothing if she isn't? And I
      know who rings the telephone at night. It's her."
    </p>
    <p>
      "What on earth for?" I demanded as ungrammatical and hardly less uneasy
      than Maggie.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She wakes us up, so we can get out in time. She's a preacher's daughter.
      More than likely she draws the line at bloodshed. That's one reason. Maybe
      there's another. What if by pressing a button somewhere and ringing that
      bell, it sets off a bomb somewhere?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "It never has," I observed dryly.
    </p>
    <p>
      But however absurd Maggie's logic might be, she was firm in her major
      premise. Miss Emily had been on her hands and knees by the
      telephone-stand, and had, on seeing Maggie, observed that she had dropped
      the money for the hackman out of her glove.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Which I don't believe. Her gloves were on the stand. If you'll come back,
      Miss Agnes, I'll show you how she was."
    </p>
    <p>
      We made rather an absurd procession, Maggie leading with the saucer, I
      following, and the cat, appearing from nowhere as usual, bringing up the
      rear. Maggie placed the jelly on the stand, and dropped on her hands and
      knees, crawling under the stand, a confused huddle of gingham apron,
      jelly-stains, and suspicion.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She had her head down like this," she said, in rather a smothered voice.
      "I'm her, and you're me. And I says: 'If it's rolled off somewhere I'll
      find it next time I sweep, and give it back to you.' Well, what d'you
      think of that! Here it is!"
    </p>
    <p>
      My attention had by this time been caught by the jelly, now unmistakably
      solidifying in the center. I moved to the kitchen door to tell Delia to
      take it off the fire. When I returned, Maggie was digging under the
      telephone battery-box with a hair-pin and muttering to herself.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Darnation!" she said, "it's gone under!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "If you do get it," I reminded her, "it belongs to Miss Emily."
    </p>
    <p>
      There is a curious strain of cupidity in Maggie. I have never been able to
      understand it. With her own money she is as free as air. But let her see a
      chance for illegitimate gain, of finding a penny on the street, of not
      paying her fare on the cars, of passing a bad quarter, and she is filled
      with an unholy joy. And so today. The jelly was forgotten. Terror was
      gone. All that existed for Maggie was a twenty-five cent piece under a
      battery-box.
    </p>
    <p>
      Suddenly she wailed: "It's gone, Miss Agnes. It's clear under!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Good heavens, Maggie! What difference does it make?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "W'you mind if I got the ice-pick and unscrewed the box?"
    </p>
    <p>
      My menage is always notoriously short of tools.
    </p>
    <p>
      I forbade it at once, and ordered her back to the kitchen, and after a
      final squint along the carpet, head flat, she dragged herself out and to
      her feet.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'll get the jelly off," she said, "and then maybe a hat pin'll reach it.
      I can see the edge of it."
    </p>
    <p>
      A loud crack from the kitchen announced that cook had forgotten the silver
      spoon, and took Maggie off on a jump. I went back to the library and
      "Bolivar County," and, I must confess, to a nap in my chair.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was roused by the feeling that some one was staring at me. My eyes
      focused first on the icepick, then, as I slowly raised them, on Maggie's
      face, set in hard and uncompromising lines.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'd thank you to come with me," she said stiffly.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Come where?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "To the telephone."
    </p>
    <p>
      I groaned inwardly. But, because submission to Maggie's tyranny has become
      a firm habit with me, I rose. I saw then that she held a dingy quarter in
      one hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      Without a word she turned and stalked ahead of me into the hall. It is
      curious, looking back and remembering that she had then no knowledge of
      the significance of things, to remember how hard and inexorable her back
      was. Viewed through the light of what followed, I have never been able to
      visualize Maggie moving down the hall. It has always been a menacing
      figure, rather shadowy than real. And the hail itself takes on grotesque
      proportions, becomes inordinately long, an infinity of hall, fading away
      into time and distance.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet it was only a moment, of course, until I stood by the telephone.
      Maggie had been at work. The wooden box which covered the battery-jars had
      been removed, and lay on its side. The battery-jars were uncovered, giving
      an effect of mystery unveiled, a sort of shamelessness, of destroyed
      illusion.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie pointed. "There's a paper under one of the jars," she said. "I
      haven't touched it, but I know well enough what it is."
    </p>
    <p>
      I have not questioned Maggie on this point, but I am convinced that she
      expected to find a sort of final summons, of death's visiting-card, for
      one or the other of us.
    </p>
    <p>
      The paper was there, a small folded scrap, partially concealed under a
      jar.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Them prints was there, too," Maggie said, non-committally.
    </p>
    <p>
      The box had accumulated the flocculent floating particles of months,
      possibly years&mdash;lint from the hall carpet giving it a reddish tinge.
      And in this light and evanescent deposit, fluttered by a breath, fingers
      had moved, searched, I am tempted to say groped, although the word seems
      absurd for anything so small. The imprint of Maggie's coin and of her
      attempts at salvage were at the edge and quite distinct from the others.
    </p>
    <p>
      I lifted the jar and picked up the paper. It was folded and refolded until
      it was not much larger than a thumb-nail, a rather stiff paper crossed
      with faint blue lines. I am not sure that I would have opened it&mdash;it
      had been so plainly in hiding, and was so obviously not my affair&mdash;had
      not Maggie suddenly gasped and implored me not to look at it. I
      immediately determined to examine it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet, after I had read it twice, it had hardly made an impression on my
      mind. There are some things so incredible that the brain automatically
      rejects them. I looked at the paper. I read it with my eyes. But I did not
      grasp it.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was not note paper. It was apparently torn from a tablet of glazed and
      ruled paper&mdash;just such paper, for instance, as Maggie soaks in brandy
      and places on top of her jelly before tying it up. It had been raggedly
      torn. The scrap was the full width of the sheet, but only three inches or
      so deep. It was undated, and this is what it said:
    </p>
    <p>
      "To Whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman
      (here) in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
    </p>
    <p>
      "(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie had read the confession over my shoulder, and I felt her body grow
      rigid. As for myself, my first sensation was one of acute discomfort&mdash;that
      we should have exposed the confession to the light of day. Neither of us,
      I am sure, had really grasped it. Maggie put a trembling hand on my arm.
    </p>
    <p>
      "The brass of her," she said, in a thin, terrified voice. "And sitting in
      church like the rest of us. Oh, my God, Miss Agnes, put it back!"
    </p>
    <p>
      I whirled on her, in a fury that was only an outlet for my own shock.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Once for all, Maggie," I said, "I'll ask you to wait until you are spoken
      to. And if I hear that you have so much as mentioned this&mdash;piece of
      paper, out you go and never come back."
    </p>
    <p>
      But she was beyond apprehension. She was literal, too. She saw, not Miss
      Emily unbelievably associated with a crime, but the crime itself. "Who
      d'you suppose it was, Miss Agnes?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I don't believe it at all. Some one has placed it there to hurt Miss
      Emily."
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's her writing," said Maggie doggedly.
    </p>
    <p>
      After a time I got rid of her, and sat down to think in the library.
      Rather I sat down to reason with myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      For every atom of my brain was clamoring that this thing was true, that my
      little Miss Emily, exquisite and fine as she was, had done the thing she
      claimed to have done. It was her own writing, thin, faintly shaded, as
      neat and as erect as herself. But even that I would not accept, until I
      had compared it with such bits of hers as I possessed, the note begging me
      to take the house, the inscription on the fly-leaf of "Fifty Years in
      Bolivar County."
    </p>
    <p>
      And here was something I could not quite understand. The writing was all
      of the same order, but while the confession and the inscription in the
      book were similar, letter for letter, in the note to me there were
      differences, a change in the "t" in Benton, a fuller and blacker stroke, a
      variation in the terminals of the letters&mdash;it is hard to
      particularize.
    </p>
    <p>
      I spent the remainder of the day in the library, going out for dinner, of
      course, but returning to my refuge again immediately after. Only in the
      library am I safe from Maggie. By virtue of her responsibility for my
      wardrobe, she virtually shares my bedroom, but her respect for books she
      never reads makes her regard a library as at least semi-holy ground. She
      dusts books with more caution than china, and her respect for a family
      Bible is greater than her respect for me.
    </p>
    <p>
      I spent the evening there, Miss Emily's cat on the divan, and the
      mysterious confession lying before me under the lamp. At night the
      variation between it and her note to me concerning the house seemed more
      pronounced. The note looked more like a clumsy imitation of Miss Emily's
      own hand. Or&mdash;perhaps this is nearer&mdash;as if, after writing in a
      certain way for sixty years, she had tried to change her style.
    </p>
    <p>
      All my logic ended in one conclusion. She must have known the confession
      was there. Therefore the chances were that she had placed it there. But it
      was not so simple as that.
    </p>
    <p>
      Both crime and confession indicated a degree of impulse that Miss Emily
      did not possess. I have entirely failed with my picture of Miss Emily if
      the word violence can be associated with her in any way. Miss Emily was a
      temple, clean swept, cold, and empty. She never acted on impulse. Every
      action, almost every word, seemed the result of thought and deliberation.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet, if I could believe my eyes, five years before she had killed a woman
      in this very house. Possibly in the very room in which I was then sitting.
    </p>
    <p>
      I find, on looking back, that the terror must have left me that day. It
      had, for so many weeks, been so much a part of my daily life that I would
      have missed it had it not been for this new and engrossing interest. I
      remember that the long French windows of the library reflected the room
      like mirrors against the darkness outside, and that once I thought I saw a
      shadowy movement in one of them, as though a figure moved behind me. But
      when I turned sharply there was no one there, and Maggie proved to be, as
      usual after nine o'clock, shut away upstairs.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was not terrified. And indeed the fear never returned. In all the course
      of my investigations, I was never again a victim of the unreasoning fright
      of those earlier days.
    </p>
    <p>
      My difficulty was that I was asked to believe the unbelievable. It was
      impossible to reconstruct in that quiet house a scene of violence. It was
      equally impossible, in view, for instance, of that calm and filial
      inscription in the history of Bolivar County, to connect Miss Emily with
      it. She had killed a woman, forsooth! Miss Emily, of the baby afghans, of
      the weary peddler, of that quiet seat in the church.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet I knew now that Miss Emily knew of the confession; knew, at least, of
      something concealed in that corner of the rear hall which housed the
      telephone. Had she by chance an enemy who would have done this thing? But
      to suspect Miss Emily of an enemy was as absurd as to suspect her of a
      crime.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was completely at a loss when I put out the lights and prepared to close
      the house. As I glanced back along the hall, I could not help wondering if
      the telephone, having given up its secret, would continue its nocturnal
      alarms. As I stood there, I heard the low growl of thunder and the patter
      of rain against the windows. Partly out of loneliness, partly out of
      bravado, I went back to the telephone and tried to call Willie. But the
      line was out of order.
    </p>
    <p>
      I slept badly. Shortly after I returned I heard a door slamming
      repeatedly, which I knew meant an open window somewhere. I got up and went
      into the hall. There was a cold air coming from somewhere below. But as I
      stood there it ceased. The door above stopped slamming, and silence
      reigned again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie roused me early. The morning sunlight was just creeping into the
      room, and the air was still cool with the night and fresh-washed by the
      storm.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Miss Agnes," she demanded, standing over me, "did you let the cat out
      last night?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I brought him in before I went to bed."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Humph!" said Maggie. "And did I or did I not wash the doorstep
      yesterday?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "You ought to know. You said you did."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Miss Agnes," Maggie said, "that woman was in this house last night. You
      can see her footprints as plain as day on the doorstep. And what's more,
      she stole the cat and let out your mother's Paisley shawl."
    </p>
    <p>
      Which statements, corrected, proved to be true. My old Paisley shawl was
      gone from the hallrack, and unquestionably the cat had been on the back
      doorstep that morning along with the milk bottles. Moreover, one of my
      fresh candles had been lighted, but had burned for only a moment or two.
    </p>
    <p>
      That day I had a second visit from young Martin Sprague. The telephone was
      in working order again, having unaccountably recovered, and I was using it
      when he came. He watched me quizzically from a position by the newelpost,
      as I rang off.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I was calling Miss Emily Benton," I explained, "but she is ill."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Still troubled with telephobia?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have other things to worry me, Martin," I said gravely, and let him
      into the library.
    </p>
    <p>
      There I made a clean breast of everything I omitted nothing. The fear, the
      strange ringing of the telephone bell; the gasping breathing over it the
      night before; Miss Emily's visit to it. And, at last, the discovery.
    </p>
    <p>
      He took the paper when I offered it to him, and examined it carefully by a
      window. Then he stood looking out and whistling reflectively. At last he
      turned back to the room.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's an unusual story," he said. "But if you'll give me a little time
      I'll explain it to you. In the first place, let go of the material things
      for a moment, and let's deal with minds and emotions. You're a sensitive
      person, Miss Agnes. You catch a lot of impressions that pass most people
      by. And, first of all, you've been catching fright from two sources."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Two sources?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Two. Maggie is one. She hates the country. She is afraid of old houses.
      And she sees in this house only the ghosts of people who have died here."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I pay no attention to Maggie's fears."
    </p>
    <p>
      "You only think that. But to go further&mdash;you have been receiving
      waves of apprehension from another source&mdash;from the little lady, Miss
      Emily."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Then you think&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Hold on," he said smiling. "I think she wrote that confession. Yes. As a
      matter of fact, I'm quite sure she did. And she has established a system
      of espionage on you by means of the telephone. If you had discovered the
      confession, she knew that there would be a change in your voice, in your
      manner. If you answered very quickly, as though you had been near the
      instrument, perhaps in the very act of discovering the paper&mdash;don't
      you get it? And can't you see how her terror affected you even over the
      wire? Don't you think that, if thought can travel untold distances, fear
      can? Of course."
    </p>
    <p>
      "But, Martin!" I exclaimed. "Little Miss Emily a murderess."
    </p>
    <p>
      He threw up his hands.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Certainly not," he said. "You're a shrewd woman, Miss Agnes. Do you know
      that a certain type of woman frequently confesses to a crime she never
      committed, or had any chance of committing? Look at the police records&mdash;confessions
      of women as to crimes they could only have heard of through the
      newspapers! I would like to wager that if we had the newspapers of that
      date that came into this house, we would find a particularly atrocious and
      mysterious murder being featured&mdash;the murder of a woman."
    </p>
    <p>
      "You do not know her," I maintained doggedly. And drew, as best I could, a
      sketch of Miss Emily, while he listened attentively.
    </p>
    <p>
      "A pure neurasthenic type," was his comment. "Older than usual, but that
      is accountable by the sheltered life she has led. The little Miss Emily is
      still at heart a girl. And a hysterical girl."
    </p>
    <p>
      "She has had enough trouble to develop her."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Trouble! Has she ever had a genuine emotion? Look at this house. She
      nursed an old father in it, a bedridden mother, a paretic brother, when
      she should have been having children. Don't you see it, Miss Agnes? All
      her emotions have had to be mental. Failing them outside, she provided
      them for herself. This&mdash;" he tapped the paper in his hand&mdash;"this
      is one."
    </p>
    <p>
      I had heard of people confessing to crimes they had never committed, and
      at the time Martin Sprague at least partly convinced me. He was so sure of
      himself. And when, that afternoon, he telephoned me from the city to say
      that he was mailing out some old newspapers, I knew quite well what he had
      found.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I've thought of something else, Miss Agnes," he said. "If you'll look it
      up you will probably find that the little lady had had either a shock
      sometime before that, or a long pull of nursing. Something, anyhow, to set
      her nervous system to going in the wrong direction."
    </p>
    <p>
      Late that afternoon, as it happened, I was enabled to learn something of
      this from a visiting neighbor, and once again I was forced to acknowledge
      that he might be right.
    </p>
    <p>
      The neighbors had not been over cordial. I had gathered, from the first,
      the impression that the members of the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus Benton's
      congregation did not fancy an interloper among the sacred relics of the
      historian of Bolivar County. And I had a corroboration of that impression
      from my visitor of that afternoon, a Mrs. Graves.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I've been slow in coming, Miss Blakiston," she said, seating herself
      primly. "I don't suppose you can understand, but this has always been the
      Benton place, and it seems strange to us to see new faces here."
    </p>
    <p>
      I replied, with some asperity, that I had not been anxious to take the
      house, but that Miss Emily had been so insistent that I had finally done
      so.
    </p>
    <p>
      It seemed to me that she flashed a quick glance at me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She is quite the most loved person in the valley," she said. "And she
      loves the place. It is&mdash;I cannot imagine why she rented the house.
      She is far from comfortable where she is."
    </p>
    <p>
      After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as the
      cause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agent wished
      her to ask more, but she refused."
    </p>
    <p>
      She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk
      gloves. And when she spoke again it was of the garden. But before she left
      she returned to Miss Emily.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She has had a hard life, in a way," she said. "It is only five years
      since she buried her brother, and her father not long before that. She has
      broken a great deal since then. Not that the brother&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I understand he was a great care."
    </p>
    <p>
      Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the
      ecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It was not only that," she said. "When he was&mdash;all right, he was an
      atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss
      Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he
      is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing to hold him back."
    </p>
    <p>
      Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedly toward
      the door.
    </p>
    <p>
      "In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all his books
      into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley&mdash;the hackman at the station,
      you know&mdash;and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We went away
      with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!"
    </p>
    <p>
      Martin Sprague's newspapers arrived the next morning. They bore a date of
      two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rather
      triumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of a
      young woman by some unknown assassin. It had been a grisly crime, and the
      paper was filled with details of a most sensational sort.
    </p>
    <p>
      Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily's clear, slightly
      upturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of such
      journalistic reports. But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth a precisely
      opposite view.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You will probably find," he wrote, "that the little lady is pretty well
      fed up on such stuff. The calmer and more placid the daily life, the more
      apt is the secret inner one, in such a circumscribed existence, to be a
      thriller! You might look over the books in the house. There is a historic
      case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brother to a den
      of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brother was
      subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox's Book of
      Martyrs. Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library."
    </p>
    <p>
      I put down his letter and glanced around the room. Was he right, after
      all? Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in this strange
      manner? And if it was true, was it not in its own way as mysterious as
      everything else?
    </p>
    <p>
      I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague's
      conviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily
      Benton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his assertion,
      the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and
      illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It was Fox's
      Book of Martyrs!
    </p>
    <p>
      If I may analyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselves into
      three parts. The first was fear. That seems to have given away to
      curiosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety. Of the
      three, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself at the
      time&mdash;that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing she
      claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.
    </p>
    <p>
      With regard to Martin Sprague's theory, I was divided. I wanted him to be
      right. I wanted him to be wrong. No picture I could visualize of little
      old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn. On the other
      hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession as an actual
      one.
    </p>
    <p>
      The scrap of paper became, for the time, my universe. Did I close my eyes,
      I saw it side by side with the inscription in "Fifty years of my Bolivar
      County," and letter for letter, in the same hand. Did the sun shine, I had
      it in the light, examining it, reading it. To such a point did it obsess
      me that I refused to allow Maggie to use a tablet of glazed paper she had
      found in the kitchen table drawer to tie up the jelly-glasses. It seemed,
      somehow, horrible to me.
    </p>
    <p>
      At that time I had no thought of going back five years and trying to trace
      the accuracy or falsehood of the confession. I should not have known how
      to go about it. Had such a crime been committed, how to discover it at
      this late day? Whom in all her sheltered life, could Miss Emily have
      murdered? In her small world, who could have fallen out and left no sign?
    </p>
    <p>
      It was impossible, and I knew it. And yet&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Emily was ill. The news came through the grocery boy, who came out
      every day on a bicycle, and teased the cat and carried away all the pears
      as fast as they ripened. Maggie brought me the information at luncheon.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She's sick," she said.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was only one person in both our minds those days.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Do you mean really ill, or only&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "The boy says she's breaking up. If you ask me, she caught cold the night
      she broke in here and took your Paisley shawl. And if you ask my advice,
      Miss Agnes, you'll get it back again before the heirs step in and claim
      it. They don't make them shawls nowadays, and she's as like as not to will
      it to somebody if you don't go after it."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Maggie," I said quietly, "how do you know she has that shawl?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "How did I know that paper was in the telephone-box?" she countered.
    </p>
    <p>
      And, indeed, by that time Maggie had convinced herself that she had known
      all along there was something in the telephone battery-box.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I've a sort of second sight, Miss Agnes," she added. And, with a
      shrewdness I found later was partially correct: "She was snooping around
      to see if you'd found that paper, and it came on to rain; so she took the
      shawl. I should say," said Maggie, lowering her voice, "that as like as
      not she's been in this house every night since we came."
    </p>
    <p>
      Late that afternoon I cut some of the roses from the arch for Miss Emily,
      and wrapping them against the sun, carried them to the village. At the
      last I hesitated. It was so much like prying. I turned aside at the church
      intending to leave them there for the altar. But I could find no one in
      the parish house, and no vessel to hold them.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was late afternoon. I opened a door and stepped into the old church. I
      knelt for a moment, and then sat back and surveyed the quiet building. It
      occurred to me that here one could obtain a real conception of the Benton
      family, and of Miss Emily. The church had been the realest thing in their
      lives. It had dominated them, obsessed them. When the Reverend Samuel
      Thaddeus died, they had built him, not a monument, but a parish house.
      When Carlo Benton died (however did such an ungodly name come to belong to
      a Benton?) Miss Emily according to the story, had done without fresh
      mourning and built him a window.
    </p>
    <p>
      I looked at the window. It was extremely ugly, and very devout. And under
      it was the dead man's name and two dates, 1860 and 1911.
    </p>
    <p>
      So Carlo Benton had died the year Miss Emily claimed to have done a
      murder! Another proof, I reflected that Martin Sprague would say. He had
      been on her hands for a long time, both well and ill. Small wonder if
      little Miss Emily had fallen to imagining things, or to confessing them.
    </p>
    <p>
      I looked at the memorial window once more, and I could almost visualize
      her gathering up the dead man's hateful books, and getting them as quickly
      as possible out of the house. Quite possibly there were unmentionable
      volumes among them&mdash;de Maupassant, perhaps Boccaccio. I had a
      distinct picture, too, of Mrs. Graves, lips primly set, assisting her with
      hands that fairly itched with the righteousness of her actions.
    </p>
    <p>
      I still held the roses, and as I left the church I decided to lay them on
      some grave in the churchyard. I thought it quite likely that roses from
      the same arch had been frequently used for that purpose. Some very young
      grave, I said to myself, and found one soon enough, a bit of a rectangle
      of fresh earth, and a jarful of pansies on it. It lay in the shadow of the
      Benton mausoleum.
    </p>
    <p>
      That was how I found that Carlo Benton had died on the 27th of May, 1911.
    </p>
    <p>
      I cannot claim that the fact at the time had any significance for me, or
      that I saw in it anything more than another verification of Martin
      Sprague's solution. But it enabled me to reconstruct the Benton household
      at the date that had grown so significant. The 30th would have probably
      been the day after the funeral. Perhaps the nurse was still there. He had
      had a nurse for months, according to Mrs. Graves. And there would have
      been the airing that follows long illness and death, the opened windows,
      the packing up or giving away of clothing, the pauses and silences, the
      sense of strangeness and quiet, the lowered voices. And there would have
      been, too, that remorseless packing for destruction of the dead atheist's
      books.
    </p>
    <p>
      And some time, during that day or the night that followed, little Miss
      Emily claimed to have committed her crime.
    </p>
    <p>
      I went home thoughtfully. At the gate I turned and looked back. The Benton
      Mausoleum was warm in the sunset, and the rose sprays lay, like
      outstretched arms, across the tiny grave.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie is amazingly efficient. I am efficient myself, I trust, but I
      modify it with intelligence. It is not to me a vital matter, for instance,
      if three dozen glasses of jelly sit on a kitchen table a day or two after
      they are prepared for retirement to the fruit cellar. I rather like to see
      them, marshaled in their neat rows, capped with sealing wax and paper, and
      armed with labels. But Maggie has neither sentiment nor imagination. Jelly
      to her is an institution, not an inspiration. It is subject to certain
      rules and rites, of which not the least is the formal interment in the
      fruit closet.
    </p>
    <p>
      Therefore, after much protesting that night, I agreed to visit the fruit
      cellar, and select a spot for the temporary entombing of thirty-six jelly
      tumblers, which would have been thirty-seven had Delia known the efficacy
      of a silver spoon. I can recall vividly the mental shift from the
      confession to that domestic excursion, my own impatience, Maggie's grim
      determination, and the curious denouement of that visit.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0003" id="link2H_4_0003">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      III
    </h2>
    <p>
      I had the very slightest acquaintance with the basement of the Benton
      house. I knew it was dry and orderly, and with that my interest in it
      ceased. It was not cemented, but its hard clay floor was almost as solid
      as macadam. In one end was built a high potato-bin. In another corner two
      or three old pews from the church, evidently long discarded and showing
      weather-stains, as though they had once served as garden benches, were
      up-ended against the whitewashed wall. The fruit-closet, built in of
      lumber, occupied one entire end, and was virtually a room, with a door and
      no windows.
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie had, she said, found it locked and had had an itinerant locksmith
      fit a key to it.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's all scrubbed and ready," she said. "I found that preserved
      melon-rind you had for lunch in a corner. 'Twouldn't of kept much longer,
      so I took it up and opened it. She's probably got all sorts of stuff
      spoiling in the locked part. Some folks're like that."
    </p>
    <p>
      Most of the shelves were open, but now, holding the lamp high, I saw that
      a closet with a door occupied one end. The door was padlocked. At the time
      I was interested, but I was, as I remember, much more occupied with
      Maggie's sense of meum and tuum, which I considered deficient, and of a
      small lecture on other people's melon rinds, which I delivered as she
      sullenly put away the jelly.
    </p>
    <p>
      But that night, after I had gone to bed, the memory of that padlock became
      strangely insistent. There was nothing psychic about the feeling I had. It
      was perfectly obvious and simple. The house held, or had held, a secret.
      Yet it was, above stairs, as open as the day. There was no corner into
      which I might not peer, except&mdash;Why was that portion of the
      fruit-closet locked?
    </p>
    <p>
      At two o'clock, finding myself unable to sleep, I got up and put on my
      dressing-gown and slippers. I had refused to repeat the experiment of
      being locked in. Then, with a candle and a box of matches, I went
      downstairs. I had, as I have said, no longer any terror of the lower
      floor. The cat lay as usual on the table in the back hall. I saw his eyes
      watching me with their curious unblinking stare, as intelligent as two
      brass buttons. He rose as my light approached, and I made a bed for him of
      a cushion from a chair, failing my Paisley shawl.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was after that that I had the curious sense of being led. It was as
      though I knew that something awaited my discovery, and that my sole
      volition was whether I should make that discovery or not. It was there,
      waiting.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have no explanation for this. And it is quite possible that I might have
      had it, to find at the end nothing more significant than root-beer, for
      instance, or bulbs for the winter garden.
    </p>
    <p>
      And indeed, at first sight, what awaited me in the locked closet amounted
      to anti-climax. For when I had broken the rusty padlock open with a
      hatchet, and had opened doors with nervous fingers, nothing more startling
      appeared than a number of books. The shelves were piled high with them, a
      motley crew of all colors, but dark shades predominating.
    </p>
    <p>
      I went back to bed, sheepishly enough, and wrapped my chilled feet in an
      extra blanket. Maggie came to the door about the time I was dozing off and
      said she had heard hammering downstairs in the cellar some time ago, but
      she had refused to waken me until the burglars had gone.
    </p>
    <p>
      "If it was burglars," she added, "you're that up-and-ready, Miss Agnes,
      that I knew if I waked you you'd be downstairs after them. What's a bit of
      silver to a human life?"
    </p>
    <p>
      I got her away at last, and she went, muttering something about digging up
      the cellar floor and finding an uneasy spirit. Then I fell asleep.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had taken cold that night, and the following morning I spent in bed. At
      noon Maggie came upstairs, holding at arm's length a book. She kept her
      face averted, and gave me a slanting and outraged glance.
    </p>
    <p>
      "This is a nice place we've come to," she said, acidly. "Murder in the
      telephone and anti-Christ in the fruit cellar!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why, Maggie," I expostulated.
    </p>
    <p>
      "If these books stay, I go, and that's flat, Miss Agnes," was her ipse
      dixit. She dropped the book on the bed and stalked out, pausing at the
      door only to throw back, "If this is a clergyman's house, I guess I'd be
      better out of the church."
    </p>
    <p>
      I took up the book. It was well-worn, and in the front, in a heavy
      masculine hand, the owner had written his name&mdash;written it large, a
      bit defiantly, perhaps. It had taken both courage and conviction to bring
      such a book into that devout household.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am not quick, mentally, especially when it comes to logical thought. I
      daresay I am intuitive rather than logical. It was not by any process of
      reasoning at all, I fancy, that it suddenly seemed strange that there
      should be books locked away in the cellar. Yet it was strange. For that
      had been a bookish household. Books were its stock in trade, one may say.
      Such as I had borrowed from the library had been carefully tended. Torn
      leaves were neatly repaired. The reference books were alphabetically
      arranged. And, looking back on my visit to the cellar, I recalled now as
      inconsistent the disorder of those basement shelves.
    </p>
    <p>
      I did not reach the truth until, that afternoon, I made a second visit to
      the cellar. Mrs. Graves had been mistaken. If not all Carlo Benton's
      proscribed books were hidden there, at least a large portion of his
      library was piled, in something like confusion, on the shelves. Yet she
      maintained that they had searched the house, and she herself had been
      present when the books were packed and taken away to the river.
    </p>
    <p>
      That afternoon I returned Mrs. Graves's visit. She was at home, and in a
      sort of flurried neatness that convinced me she had seen me from far up
      the road. That conviction was increased by the amazing promptness with
      which a tea-tray followed my entrance. I had given her tea the day she
      came to see me, and she was not to be outdone. Indeed, I somehow gained
      the impression that tray and teapot, and even little cakes, had been
      waiting, day by day, for my anticipated visit.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was not hard to set her talking of Carlo Benton and his wickedness. She
      rose to the bait like a hungry fish. Yet I gathered that, beyond his
      religious views or lack of them, she knew nothing. But on the matter of
      the books she was firm.
    </p>
    <p>
      "After the box was ready," she said, "we went to every room and searched
      it. Miss Emily was set on clearing out every trace. At the last minute I
      found one called 'The Fallacy of Christianity' slipped down behind the
      dresser in his room, and we put that in."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was "The Fallacy of Christianity" that Maggie had brought me that
      morning.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It is a most interesting story," I observed. "What delicious tea, Mrs.
      Graves! And then you fastened up the box and saw it thrown into the river.
      It was quite a ceremony."
    </p>
    <p>
      "My dear," Mrs. Graves said solemnly, "it was not a ceremony. It was a
      rite&mdash;a significant rite."
    </p>
    <p>
      How can I reconcile the thoughts I had that afternoon with my later visit
      to Miss Emily? The little upper room in the village, dominated and almost
      filled by an old-fashioned bed, and Miss Emily, frail and delicate and
      beautifully neat, propped with pillows and holding a fine handkerchief, as
      fresh as the flutings of her small cap, in her hand. On a small stand
      beside the bed were her Bible, her spectacles, and her quaint
      old-fashioned gold watch.
    </p>
    <p>
      And Miss Emily herself? She was altered, shockingly altered. A certain
      tenseness had gone, a tenseness that had seemed to uphold her frail body
      and carry her about. Only her eyes seemed greatly alive, and before I left
      they, too, had ceased their searching of mine and looked weary and old.
    </p>
    <p>
      And, at the end of my short visit, I had reluctantly reached this
      conclusion: either Miss Emily had done the thing she confessed to doing,
      incredible as it might appear, or she thought she had done it; and the
      thing was killing her.
    </p>
    <p>
      She knew I had found the confession. I knew that. It was written large
      over her. What she had expected me to do God only knows. To stand up and
      denounce her? To summon the law? I do not know.
    </p>
    <p>
      She said an extraordinary thing, when at last I rose to go. I believe now
      that it was to give me my chance to speak. Probably she found the suspense
      intolerable. But I could not do it. I was too surprised, too perplexed,
      too&mdash;well, afraid of hurting her. I had the feeling, I know, that I
      must protect her. And that feeling never left me until the end.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think you must know, my dear," she said, from her pillows, "that I have
      your Paisley shawl."
    </p>
    <p>
      I was breathless. "I thought that, perhaps"&mdash;I stumbled.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It was raining that night," she said in her soft, delicate voice. "I have
      had it dried and pressed. It is not hurt. I thought you would not mind,"
      she concluded.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It does not matter at all&mdash;not in the least," I said unhappily.
    </p>
    <p>
      I am quite sure now that she meant me to speak then. I can recall the way
      she fixed her eyes on me, serene and expectant. She was waiting. But to
      save my life I could not. And she did not. Had she gone as far as she had
      the strength to go? Or was this again one of those curious pacts of hers&mdash;if
      I spoke or was silent, it was to be?
    </p>
    <p>
      I do not know.
    </p>
    <p>
      I do know that we were both silent and that at last, with a quick breath,
      she reached out and thumped on the floor with a cane that stood beside the
      bed until a girl came running up from below stairs.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Get the shawl, Fanny, dear," said Miss Emily, "and wrap it up for Miss
      Blakiston."
    </p>
    <p>
      I wanted desperately, while the girl left the room to obey, to say
      something helpful, something reassuring. But I could not. My voice failed
      me. And Miss Emily did not give me another opportunity. She thanked me
      rather formally for the flowers I had brought from her garden, and let me
      go at last with the parcel under my arm, without further reference to it.
      The situation was incredible.
    </p>
    <p>
      Somehow I had the feeling that Miss Emily would never reopen the subject
      again. She had given me my chance, at who knows what cost, and I had not
      taken it. There had been something in her good-by&mdash;I can not find
      words for it, but it was perhaps a finality, an effect of a closed door&mdash;that
      I felt without being able to analyze.
    </p>
    <p>
      I walked back to the house, refusing the offices of Mr. Staley, who met me
      on the road. I needed to think. But thinking took me nowhere. Only one
      conclusion stood out as a result of a mile and a half of mental struggle.
      Something must be done. Miss Emily ought to be helped. She was under a
      strain that was killing her.
    </p>
    <p>
      But to help I should know the facts. Only, were there any facts to know?
      Suppose&mdash;just by way of argument, for I did not believe it&mdash;that
      the confession was true; how could I find out anything about it? Five
      years was a long time. I could not go to the neighbors. They were none too
      friendly as it was. Besides, the secret, if there was one, was not mine,
      but was Miss Emily's.
    </p>
    <p>
      I reached home at last, and smuggled the shawl into the house. I had no
      intention of explaining its return to Maggie. Yet, small as it was in its
      way, it offered a problem at once. For Maggie has a penetrating eye and an
      inquiring nature. I finally decided to take the bull by the horns and hang
      it in its accustomed place in the hall, where Maggie, finding it at nine
      o'clock that evening, set up such a series of shrieks and exclamations as
      surpassed even her own record.
    </p>
    <p>
      I knitted that evening. It has been my custom for years to knit
      bedroom-slippers for an old ladies' home in which I am interested. Because
      I can work at them with my eyes shut, through long practise, I find the
      work soothing. So that evening I knitted at Eliza Klinordlinger's fifth
      annual right slipper, and tried to develop a course of action.
    </p>
    <p>
      I began with a major premise&mdash;to regard the confession as a real one,
      until it was proved otherwise. Granted, then, that my little old Miss
      Emily had killed a woman.
    </p>
    <p>
      1st&mdash;Who was the woman?
    </p>
    <p>
      2nd&mdash;Where is the body?
    </p>
    <p>
      3rd&mdash;What was the reason for the crime?
    </p>
    <p>
      Question two I had a tentative answer for. However horrible and incredible
      it seemed, it was at least possible that Miss Emily had substituted the
      body for the books, and that what Mrs. Graves described as a rite had
      indeed been one. But that brought up a picture I could not face. And yet&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      I called up the local physician, a Doctor Lingard, that night and asked
      him about Miss Emily's condition. He was quite frank with me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's just a breaking up," he said. "It has come early, because she has
      had a trying life, and more responsibility than she should have had."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have been wondering if a change of scene would not be a good thing," I
      suggested. But he was almost scornful.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Change!" he said. "I've been after her to get away for years. She won't
      leave. I don't believe she has been twelve miles away in thirty years."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I suppose her brother was a great care," I observed.
    </p>
    <p>
      It seemed to me that the doctor's hearty voice was a trifle less frank
      when he replied. But when I rang off I told myself that I, too, was
      becoming neurasthenic and suspicious. I had, however, learned what I had
      wanted to know. Miss Emily had had no life outside Bolivar County. The
      place to look for her story was here, in the immediate vicinity.
    </p>
    <p>
      That night I made a second visit to the basement. It seemed to me, with
      those chaotic shelves before me, that something of the haste and terror of
      a night five years before came back to me, a night when, confronted by the
      necessity for concealing a crime, the box upstairs had been hurriedly
      unpacked, its contents hidden here and locked away, and some other
      content, inert and heavy, had taken the place of the books.
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Emily in her high bed, her Bible and spectacles on the stand beside
      her, her starched pillows, her soft and highbred voice? Or another Miss
      Emily, panting and terror-stricken, carrying down her armfuls of forbidden
      books, her slight figure bent under their weight, her ears open for sounds
      from the silent house? Or that third Miss Emily, Martin Sprague's, a
      strange wild creature, neither sane nor insane, building a crime out of
      the fabric of a nightmare? Which was the real Emily Benton?
    </p>
    <p>
      Or was there another contingency that I had not thought of? Had some
      secret enemy of Miss Emily's, some hysterical girl from the parish,
      suffering under a fancied slight, or some dismissed and revengeful
      servant, taken this strange method of retaliation, done it and then warned
      the little old lady that her house contained such a paper? I confess that
      this last thought took hold on me. It offered a way out that I clutched
      at.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had an almost frantic feeling by that time that I must know the truth.
      Suspense was weighing on me. And Maggie, never slow to voice an unpleasant
      truth, said that night, as she brought the carafe of ice-water to the
      library, "You're going off the last few days, Miss Agnes." And when I made
      no reply: "You're sagging around the chin. There's nothing shows age like
      the chin. If you'd rub a little lemon-juice on at night you'd tighten up
      some."
    </p>
    <p>
      I ignored her elaborately, but I knew she was right. Heat and sleepless
      nights and those early days of fear had told on me. And although I usually
      disregard Maggie's cosmetic suggestions, culled from the beauty columns of
      the evening paper, a look in the mirror decided me. I went downstairs for
      the lemon. At least, I thought it was for the lemon. I am not sure. I have
      come to be uncertain of my motives. It is distinctly possible that,
      sub-consciously, I was making for the cellar all the time. I only know
      that I landed there, with a lemon in my hand, at something after eleven
      o'clock.
    </p>
    <p>
      The books were piled in disorder on the shelves. Their five years of
      burial had not hurt them beyond a slight dampness of the leaves. No hand,
      I believe, had touched them since they were taken from the box where Mrs.
      Graves had helped to pack them. Then, if I were shrewd, I should perhaps
      gather something from their very disorder, But, as a matter of fact, I did
      not.
    </p>
    <p>
      I would, quite certainly, have gone away as I came, clueless, had I not
      attempted to straighten a pile of books, dangerously sagging&mdash;like my
      chin!&mdash;and threatening a fall. My effort was rewarded by a veritable
      Niagara of books. They poured over the edge, a few first, then more, until
      I stood, it seemed, knee-deep in a raging sea of atheism.
    </p>
    <p>
      Somewhat grimly I set to work to repair the damage, and one by one I
      picked them up and restored them. I put them in methodically this time,
      glancing at each title to place the volume upright. Suddenly, out of the
      darkness of unbelief, a title caught my eye and held it, "The Handwriting
      of God." I knew the book. It had fallen into bad company, but its theology
      was unimpeachable. It did not belong. It&mdash;
    </p>
    <p>
      I opened it. The Reverend Samuel Thaddeus had written his own name in it,
      in the cramped hand I had grown to know. Evidently its presence there was
      accidental. I turned it over in my hands, and saw that it was closed down
      on something, on several things, indeed. They proved to be a small black
      note-book, a pair of spectacles, a woman's handkerchief.
    </p>
    <p>
      I stood there looking at them. They might mean nothing but the accidental
      closing of a book, which was mistakenly placed in bad company, perhaps by
      Mrs. Graves. I was inclined to doubt her knowledge of religious
      literature. Or they might mean something more, something I had feared to
      find.
    </p>
    <p>
      Armed with the volume, and the lemon forgotten&mdash;where the cook found
      it the next day and made much of the mystery&mdash;I went upstairs again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Viewed in a strong light, the three articles took on real significance.
      The spectacles I fancied were Miss Emily's. They were, to all appearances,
      the duplicates of those on her tidy bedside stand. But the handkerchief
      was not hers. Even without the scent, which had left it, but clung
      obstinately to the pages of the book, I knew it was not hers. It was
      florid, embroidered, and cheap. And held close to the light, I made out a
      laundry-mark in ink on the border. The name was either Wright or Knight.
    </p>
    <p>
      The note-book was an old one, and covered a period of almost twenty years.
      It contained dates and cash entries. The entries were nearly all in the
      Reverend Samuel Thaddeus's hand, but after the date of his death they had
      been continued in Miss Emily's writing. They varied little, save that the
      amounts gradually increased toward the end, and the dates were further
      apart. Thus, in 1898 there were six entries, aggregating five hundred
      dollars. In 1902-1903 there were no entries at all, but in 1904 there was
      a single memorandum of a thousand dollars. The entire amount must have
      been close to twenty-five thousand dollars. There was nothing to show
      whether it was money saved or money spent, money paid out or come in.
    </p>
    <p>
      But across the years 1902 and 1903, the Reverend Thaddeus had written
      diagonally the word "Australia." There was a certain amount of
      enlightenment there. Carlo Benton had been in Australia during those
      years. In his "Fifty Years in Bolivar County," the father had rather
      naively quoted a letter from Carlo Benton in Melbourne. A record, then, in
      all probability, of sums paid by this harassed old man to a worthless son.
    </p>
    <p>
      Only the handkerchief refused to be accounted for.
    </p>
    <p>
      I did not sleep that night. More and more, as I lay wide-eyed through the
      night, it seemed to me that Miss Emily must be helped, that she was
      drifting miserably out of life for need of a helping hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      Once, toward morning, I dozed off, to waken in a state of terror that I
      recognized as a return of the old fear. But it left me soon, although I
      lay awake until morning.
    </p>
    <p>
      That day I made two resolves&mdash;to send for Willie and to make a
      determined effort to see the night telephone-operator. My letter to Willie
      off, I tried to fill the day until the hour when the night
      telephone-operator was up and about, late in the afternoon.
    </p>
    <p>
      The delay was simplified by the arrival of Mrs. Graves, in white silk
      gloves and a black cotton umbrella as a sunshade. She had lost her air of
      being afraid I might patronize her, and explained pantingly that she had
      come on an errand, not to call.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'm at my Christmas presents now," she said, "and I've fixed on a bedroom
      set for Miss Emily. I suppose you won't care if I go right up and measure
      the dresser-top, will you?"
    </p>
    <p>
      I took her up, and her sharp eyes roved over the stairs and the upper
      hall.
    </p>
    <p>
      "That's where Carlo died," she said. "It's never been used since, unless
      you&mdash;" she had paused, staring into Miss Emily's deserted bedroom.
      "It's a good thing I came," she said. "The eye's no use to trust to,
      especially for bureaus."
    </p>
    <p>
      She looked around the room. There was, at that moment, something tender
      about her. She even lowered her voice and softened it. It took on, almost
      comically, the refinements of Miss Emily's own speech.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Whose photograph is that?" she asked suddenly. "I don't know that I ever
      saw it before. But it looks familiar, too."
    </p>
    <p>
      She reflected before it. It was clear that she felt a sort of resentment
      at not recognizing the young and smiling woman in the old walnut frame,
      but a moment later she was measuring the dresser-top, her mind set on
      Christmas benevolence.
    </p>
    <p>
      However, before she went out, she paused near the photograph.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's queer," she said. "I've been in this room about a thousand times,
      and I've never noticed it before. I suppose you can get so accustomed to a
      thing that you don't notice it."
    </p>
    <p>
      As she went out, she turned to me, and I gathered that not only the
      measurement for a gift had brought her that afternoon.
    </p>
    <p>
      "About those books," she said. "I run on a lot when I get to talking. I
      suppose I shouldn't have mentioned them. But I'm sure you'll keep the
      story to yourself. I've never even told Mr. Graves."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Of course I shall," I assured her. "But&mdash;didn't the hackman see you
      packing the books?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "No, indeed. We packed them the afternoon after the funeral, and it was
      the next day that Staley took them off. He thought it was old bedding and
      so on, and he hinted to have it given to him. So Miss Emily and I went
      along to see it was done right."
    </p>
    <p>
      So I discovered that the box had sat overnight in the Benton house. There
      remained, if I was to help Miss Emily, to discover what had occurred in
      those dark hours when the books were taken out and something else
      substituted.
    </p>
    <p>
      The total result of my conversation that afternoon on the front porch of
      the small frame house on a side street with the night telephone-operator
      was additional mystery.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was not prepared for it. I had anticipated resentment and possibly
      insolence. But I had not expected to find fright. Yet the girl was
      undeniably frightened. I had hardly told her the object of my visit before
      I realized that she was in a state of almost panic.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You can understand how I feel," I said. "I have no desire to report the
      matter, of course. But some one has been calling the house repeatedly at
      night, listening until I reply, and then hanging up the receiver. It is
      not accidental. It has happened too often."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'm not supposed to give out information about calls."
    </p>
    <p>
      "But&mdash;just think a moment," I went on. "Suppose some one is planning
      to rob the house, and using this method of finding out if we are there or
      not?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I don't remember anything about the calls you are talking about," she
      parried, without looking at me. "As busy as I am&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Nonsense," I put in, "you know perfectly well what I am talking about.
      How do I know but that it is the intention of some one to lure me
      downstairs to the telephone and then murder me?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I am sure it is not that," she said. For almost the first time she looked
      directly at me, and I caught a flash of something&mdash;not defiance. It
      was, indeed, rather like reassurance.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You see, you know it is not that." I felt all at once that she did know
      who was calling me at night, and why. And, moreover, that she would not
      tell. If, as I suspected, it was Miss Emily, this girl must be to some
      extent in her confidence.
    </p>
    <p>
      "But&mdash;suppose for a moment that I think I know who is calling me?" I
      hesitated. She was a pretty girl, with an amiable face, and more than a
      suggestion of good breeding and intelligence about her. I made a quick
      resolve to appeal to her. "My dear child," I said, "I want so very much,
      if I can, to help some one who is in trouble. But before I can help, I
      must know that I can help, and I must be sure it is necessary. I wonder if
      you know what I am talking about?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why don't you go back to the city?" she said suddenly. "Go away and
      forget all about us here. That would help more than anything."
    </p>
    <p>
      "But&mdash;would it?" I asked gently. "Would my going away help&mdash;her?"
    </p>
    <p>
      To my absolute amazement she began to cry. We had been sitting on a cheap
      porch seat, side by side, and she turned her back to me and put her head
      against the arm of the bench.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She's going to die!" she said shakily. "She's weaker every day. She is
      slipping away, and no one does anything."
    </p>
    <p>
      But I got nothing more from her. She had understood me, it was clear, and
      when at last she stopped crying, she knew well enough that she had
      betrayed her understanding. But she would not talk. I felt that she was
      not unfriendly, and that she was uncertain rather than stubborn. In the
      end I got up, little better off than when I came.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'll give you time to think it over," I said. "Not so much about the
      telephone calls, because you've really answered that. But about Miss
      Emily. She needs help, and I want to help her. But you tie my hands."
    </p>
    <p>
      She had a sort of gift for silence. As I grew later on to know Anne
      Bullard better, I realized that even more. So now she sat silent, and let
      me talk.
    </p>
    <p>
      "What I want," I said, "is to have Miss Emily know that I am friendly&mdash;that
      I am willing to do anything to&mdash;to show my friendliness. Anything."
    </p>
    <p>
      "You see," she said, with a kind of dogged patience, "it isn't really up
      to you, or to me either. It's something else." She hesitated. "She's very
      obstinate," she added.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I went away I was aware that her eyes followed me, anxious and
      thoughtful eyes, with something of Miss Emily's own wide-eyed gaze.
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie came late the next evening. I had indeed gone up-stairs to retire
      when I heard his car in the drive. When I admitted him, he drew me into
      the library and gave me a good looking over.
    </p>
    <p>
      "As I thought!" he said. "Nerves gone, looks gone. I told you Maggie would
      put a curse on you. What is it?"
    </p>
    <p>
      So I told him. The telephone he already knew about. The confession he read
      over twice, and then observed, characteristically, that he would be
      eternally&mdash;I think the word is "hornswoggled."
    </p>
    <p>
      When I brought out "The Handwriting of God," following Mrs. Graves's story
      of the books, he looked thoughtful. And indeed by the end of the recital
      he was very grave.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Sprague is a lunatic," he said, with conviction. "There was a body, and
      it went into the river in the packing-case. It is distinctly possible that
      this Knight&mdash;or Wright&mdash;woman, who owned the handkerchief, was
      the victim. However, that's for later on. The plain truth is, that there
      was a murder, and that Miss Emily is shielding some one else."
    </p>
    <p>
      And, after all, that was the only immediate result of Willie's visit&mdash;a
      new theory! So that now it stood: there was a crime. There was no crime.
      Miss Emily had committed it. Miss Emily had not committed it. Miss Emily
      had confessed it, but some one else had committed it.
    </p>
    <p>
      For a few hours, however, our attention was distracted from Miss Emily and
      her concerns by the attempted robbery of the house that night. I knew
      nothing of it until I heard Willie shouting downstairs. I was deeply
      asleep, relaxed no doubt by the consciousness that at last there was a man
      in the house. And, indeed, Maggie slept for the same reason through the
      entire occurrence.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Stop, or I'll fire!" Willie repeated, as I sat up in bed.
    </p>
    <p>
      I knew quite well that he had no weapon. There was not one in the house.
      But the next moment there was a loud report, either a door slamming or a
      pistol-shot, and I ran to the head of the stairs.
    </p>
    <p>
      There was no light below, but a current of cool night air came up the
      staircase. And suddenly I realized that there was complete silence in the
      house.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Willie!" I cried out, in an agony of fright. But he did not reply. And
      then, suddenly, the telephone rang.
    </p>
    <p>
      I did not answer it. I know now why it rang, that there was real anxiety
      behind its summons. But I hardly heard it then. I was convinced that
      Willie had been shot.
    </p>
    <p>
      I must have gone noiselessly down the stairs, and at the foot I ran
      directly into Willie. He was standing there, only a deeper shadow in the
      blackness, and I had placed my hand over his, as it lay on the newel-post,
      before he knew I was on the staircase. He wheeled sharply, and I felt, to
      my surprise, that he held a revolver in his hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Willie! What is it?" I said in a low tone.
    </p>
    <p>
      "'Sh," he whispered. "Don't move&mdash;or speak."
    </p>
    <p>
      We listened, standing together. There were undoubtedly sounds outside,
      some one moving about, a hand on a window-catch, and finally not
      particularly cautious steps at the front door. It swung open. I could hear
      it creak as it moved slowly on its hinges.
    </p>
    <p>
      I put a hand out to steady myself by the comfort of Willie's presence
      before me, between me and that softly-opening door. But Willie was moving
      forward, crouched down, I fancied, and the memory of that revolver
      terrified me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Don't shoot him, Willie!" I almost shrieked.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Shoot whom?" said Willie's cool voice, just inside the door.
    </p>
    <p>
      I knew then, and I went sick all over. Somewhere in the hall between us
      crouched the man I had taken for Willie, crouched with a revolver in his
      right hand. The door was still open, I knew, and I could hear Willie
      fumbling on the hall-stand for matches. I called out something incoherent
      about not striking a light; but Willie, whistling softly to show how cool
      he was, struck a match. It was followed instantly by a report, and I
      closed my eyes.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I opened them, Willie was standing unhurt, staring over the burning
      match at the door, which was closed, and I knew that the report had been
      but the bang of the heavy door.
    </p>
    <p>
      "What in blazes slammed that door?" he said.
    </p>
    <p>
      "The burglar, or whatever he is," I said, my voice trembling in spite of
      me. "He was here, in front of me. I laid my hand on his. He had a revolver
      in it. When you opened the door, he slipped out past you."
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie muttered something, and went toward the door. A moment later I was
      alone again, and the telephone was ringing. I felt my way back along the
      hall. I touched the cat, which had been sleeping on the telephone-stand.
      He merely turned over.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have tried, in living that night over again, to record things as they
      impressed me. For, after all, this is a narrative of motive rather than of
      incidents, of emotions as against deeds. But at the time, the brief
      conversation over the telephone seemed to me both horrible and unnatural.
    </p>
    <p>
      From a great distance a woman's voice said, "Is anything wrong there?"
    </p>
    <p>
      That was the first question, and I felt quite sure that it was the Bullard
      girl's voice. That is, looking back from the safety of the next day, I so
      decided. At the time I had no thought whatever.
    </p>
    <p>
      "There is nothing wrong," I replied. I do not know why I said it. Surely
      there was enough wrong, with Willie chasing an armed intruder through the
      garden.
    </p>
    <p>
      I thought the connection had been cut, for there was a buzzing on the
      wire. But a second or so later there came an entirely different voice, one
      I had never heard before, a plaintive voice, full, I thought, of tears.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Oh, please," said this voice, "go out and look in your garden, or along
      the road. Please&mdash;quickly!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "You will have to explain," I said impatiently. "Of course we will go and
      look, but who is it, and why&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      I was cut off there, definitely, and I could not get "central's" attention
      again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie's voice from the veranda boomed through the lower floor. "This is
      I," he called, "No boiling water, please. I am coming in."
    </p>
    <p>
      He went into the library and lighted a lamp. He was smiling when I
      entered, a reassuring smile, but rather a sheepish one, too.
    </p>
    <p>
      "To think of letting him get by like that!" he said. "The cheapest kind of
      a trick. He had slammed the door before to make me think he had gone out,
      and all the time he was inside. And you&mdash;why didn't you scream?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I thought it was you," I told him.
    </p>
    <p>
      The library was in chaos. Letters were lying about, papers, books. The
      drawer of the large desk-table in the center of the room had been drawn
      out and searched. "The History of Bolivar County," for instance, was lying
      on the floor, face down, in a most ignoble position. In one place books
      had been taken from a recess by the fireplace, revealing a small wall
      cupboard behind. I had never known of the hiding-place, but a glance into
      it revealed only a bottle of red ink and the manuscript of a sermon on
      missions.
    </p>
    <p>
      Standing in the disorder of the room, I told Willie about the
      telephone-message. He listened attentively, and at first skeptically.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Probably a ruse to get us out of the house, but coming a trifle late to
      be useful," was his comment. But I had read distress in the second voice,
      and said so. At last he went to the telephone.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'll verify it," he explained. "If some one is really anxious, I'll get
      the car and take a scout around."
    </p>
    <p>
      But he received no satisfaction from the Bullard girl, who, he reported,
      listened stoically and then said she was sorry, but she did not remember
      who had called. On his reminding her that she must have a record, she
      countered with the flat statement that there had been no call for us that
      night.
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie looked thoughtful when he returned to the library. "There's a queer
      story back of all this," he said. "I think I'll get the car and scout
      around."
    </p>
    <p>
      "He is armed, Willie," I protested.
    </p>
    <p>
      "He doesn't want to shoot me, or he could have done it," was his answer.
      "I'll just take a look around, and come back to report."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was half-past three by the time he was ready to go. He was, as he
      observed, rather sketchily clad, but the night was warm. I saw him off,
      and locked the door behind him. Then I went into the library to wait and
      to put things to rights while I waited.
    </p>
    <p>
      The dawn is early in August, and although it was not more than half-past
      four when Willie came back, it was about daylight by that time. I went to
      the door and watched him bring the car to a standstill. He shook his head
      when he saw me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Absolutely nothing," he said. "It was a ruse to get me out of the house,
      of course. I've run the whole way between here and town twice."
    </p>
    <p>
      "But that could not have taken an hour," I protested.
    </p>
    <p>
      "No," he said. "I met the doctor&mdash;what's his name?&mdash;the local
      M.D. anyhow&mdash;footing it out of the village to a case, and I took him
      to his destination. He has a car, it seems, but it's out of order.
      Interesting old chap," he added, as I led the way into the house. "Didn't
      know me from Adam, but opened up when he found who I was."
    </p>
    <p>
      I had prepared the coffee machine and carried the tray to the library.
      While I lighted the lamp, he stood, whistling softly, and thoughtfully. At
      last he said:
    </p>
    <p>
      "Look here, Aunt Agnes, I think I'm a good bit of a fool, but&mdash;some
      time this morning I wish you would call up Thomas Jenkins, on the Elmburg
      road, and find out if any one is sick there."
    </p>
    <p>
      But when I stared at him, he only laughed sheepishly. "You can see how
      your suspicious disposition has undermined and ruined my once trusting
      nature," he scoffed.
    </p>
    <p>
      He took his coffee, and then, stripping off his ulster, departed for bed.
      I stopped to put away the coffee machine, and with Maggie in mind, to hang
      up his motor-coat. It was then that the flashlight fell out. I picked it
      up. It was shaped like a revolver.
    </p>
    <p>
      I stopped in Willie's room on my way to my own, and held it out to him.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Where did you get that?" I asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Good heavens!" he said, raising himself on his elbow. "It belongs to the
      doctor. He gave it to me to examine the fan belt. I must have dropped it
      into my pocket."
    </p>
    <p>
      And still I was nowhere. Suppose I had touched this flashlight at the foot
      of the stairs and mistaken it for a revolver. Suppose that the doctor,
      making his way toward the village and finding himself pursued, had faced
      about and pretended to be leaving it? Grant, in a word, that Doctor
      Lingard himself had been our night visitor&mdash;what then? Why had he
      done it? What of the telephone-call, urging me to search the road? Did
      some one realize what was happening, and take this method of warning us
      and sending us after the fugitive?
    </p>
    <p>
      I knew the Thomas Jenkins farm on the Elmsburg road. I had, indeed, bought
      vegetables and eggs from Mr. Jenkins himself. That morning, as early as I
      dared, I called the Jenkins farm. Mr. Jenkins himself would bring me three
      dozen eggs that day. They were a little torn up out there, as Mrs. Jenkins
      had borne a small daughter at seven A.M.
    </p>
    <p>
      When I told Willie, he was evidently relieved. "I'm glad of it," he said
      heartily. "The doctor's a fine old chap, and I'd hate to think he was
      mixed up in any shady business."
    </p>
    <p>
      He was insistent, that day, that I give up the house. He said it was not
      safe, and I was inclined to agree with him. But although I did not tell
      him of it, I had even more strongly than ever the impression that
      something must be done to help Miss Emily, and that I was the one who must
      do it.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet, in the broad light of day, with the sunshine pouring into the rooms,
      I was compelled to confess that Willie's theory was more than upheld by
      the facts. First of all was the character of Miss Emily as I read it,
      sternly conscientious, proud, and yet gentle. Second, there was the
      connection of the Bullard girl with the case. And third, there was the
      invader of the night before, an unknown quantity where so much seemed
      known, where a situation involving Miss Emily alone seemed to call for no
      one else.
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie put the matter flatly to me as he stood in the hall, drawing on his
      driving gloves.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Do you want to follow it up?" he asked. "Isn't it better to let it go?
      After all, you have only rented the house. You haven't taken over its
      history, or any responsibility but the rent."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think Miss Emily needs to be helped," I said, rather feebly.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Let her friends help her. She has plenty of them. Besides, isn't it
      rather a queer way to help her, to try to fasten a murder on her?"
    </p>
    <p>
      I could not explain what I felt so strongly&mdash;that Miss Emily could
      only be helped by being hurt, that whatever she was concealing, the long
      concealment was killing her. That I felt in her&mdash;it is always
      difficult to put what I felt about Miss Emily into words&mdash;that she
      both hoped for and dreaded desperately the light of the truth.
    </p>
    <p>
      But if I was hardly practical when it came to Miss Emily, I was rational
      enough in other things. It is with no small pride&mdash;but without
      exultation, for in the end it cost too much&mdash;that I point to the
      solution of one issue as my own.
    </p>
    <p>
      With Willie gone, Maggie and I settled down to the quiet tenure of our
      days. She informed me, on the morning after that eventful night, that she
      had not closed an eye after one o'clock! She came into the library and
      asked me if I could order her some sleeping-powders.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Fiddlesticks!" I said sharply. "You slept all night. I was up and around
      the house, and you never knew it."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Honest to heaven, Miss Agnes, I never slep' at all. I heard a horse
      galloping', like it was runnin' off, and it waked me for good."
    </p>
    <p>
      And after a time I felt that, however mistaken Maggie had been about her
      night's sleep, she was possibly correct about the horse.
    </p>
    <p>
      "He started to run about the stable somewhere," she said. "You can smile
      if you want. That's the heaven's truth. And he came down the drive on the
      jump and out onto the road."
    </p>
    <p>
      "We can go and look for hoof-marks," I said, and rose. But Maggie only
      shook her head.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It was no real horse, Miss Agnes," she said. "You'll find nothing.
      Anyhow, I've been and looked. There's not a mark."
    </p>
    <p>
      But Maggie was wrong. I found hoof-prints in plenty in the turf beside the
      drive, and a track of them through the lettuce-bed in the garden. More
      than that, behind the stable I found where a horse had been tied and had
      broken away. A piece of worn strap still hung there. It was sufficiently
      clear, then, that whoever had broken into the house had come on horseback
      and left afoot. But many people in the neighborhood used horses. The clue,
      if clue it can be called, got me nowhere.
    </p>
    <p>
      <a name="link2H_4_0004" id="link2H_4_0004">
      <!--  H2 anchor --> </a>
    </p>
    <div style="height: 4em;">
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </div>
    <h2>
      IV
    </h2>
    <p>
      For several days things remained in statu quo. Our lives went on evenly.
      The telephone was at our service, without any of its past vagaries.
      Maggie's eyes ceased to look as if they were being pushed out from behind,
      and I ceased to waken at night and listen for untoward signs.
    </p>
    <p>
      Willie telephoned daily. He was frankly uneasy about my remaining there.
      "You know something that somebody resents your knowing," he said, a day or
      two after the night visitor. "It may become very uncomfortable for you."
    </p>
    <p>
      And, after a day or two, I began to feel that it was being made
      uncomfortable for me. I am a social being; I like people. In the city my
      neighborly instincts have died of a sort of brick wall apathy, but in the
      country it comes to life again. The instinct of gregariousness is as old
      as the first hamlets, I daresay, when prehistoric man ceased to live in
      trees, and banded together for protection from the wild beasts that walked
      the earth.
    </p>
    <p>
      The village became unfriendly. It was almost a matter of a night. One day
      the postmistress leaned on the shelf at her window and chatted with me.
      The next she passed out my letters with hardly a glance. Mrs. Graves did
      not see me at early communion on Sunday morning. The hackman was busy when
      I called him. It was intangible, a matter of omission, not commission. The
      doctor's wife, who had asked me to tea, called up and regretted that she
      must go to the city that day.
    </p>
    <p>
      I sat down then and took stock of things. Did the village believe that
      Miss Emily must be saved from me? Did the village know the story I was
      trying to learn, and was it determined I should never find out the truth?
      And, if this were so, was the village right or was I? They would save Miss
      Emily by concealment, while I felt that concealment had failed, and that
      only the truth would do. Did the village know, or only suspect? Or was it
      not the village at all, but one or two people who were determined to drive
      me away?
    </p>
    <p>
      My theories were rudely disturbed shortly after that by a visit from
      Martin Sprague. I fancied that Willie had sent him, but he evaded my
      question.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'd like another look at that slip of paper," he said. "Where do you keep
      it, by the way?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "In a safe place," I replied non-committally, and he laughed. The truth
      was that I had taken out the removable inner sole of a slipper and had
      placed it underneath, an excellent hiding-place, but one I did not care to
      confide to him. When I had brought it downstairs, he read it over again
      carefully, and then sat back with it in his hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Now tell me about everything," he said.
    </p>
    <p>
      I did, while he listened attentively. Afterward we walked back to the
      barn, and I showed him the piece of broken halter still tied there.
    </p>
    <p>
      He surveyed it without comment, but on the way back to the house he said:
      "If the village is lined up as you say it is, I suppose it is useless to
      interview the harness-maker. He has probably repaired that strap, or sold
      a new one, to whoever&mdash;It would be a nice clue to follow up."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I am not doing detective work," I said shortly. "I am trying to help some
      one who is dying of anxiety and terror."
    </p>
    <p>
      He nodded. "I get you," he said. But his tone was not flippant. "The fact
      is, of course, that the early theory won't hold. There has been a crime,
      and the little old lady did not commit it. But suppose you find out who
      did it. How is that going to help her?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I don't know, Martin," I said, in a sort of desperation. "But I have the
      most curious feeling that she is depending on me. The way she spoke the
      day I saw her, and her eyes and everything; I know you think it nonsense,"
      I finished lamely.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think you'd better give up the place and go back to town," he said. But
      I saw that he watched me carefully, and when, at last he got up to go, he
      put a hand on my shoulder.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think you are right, after all," he said. "There are a good many things
      that can't be reasoned out with any logic we have, but that are true,
      nevertheless. We call it intuition, but it's really subconscious
      intelligence. Stay, by all means, if you feel you should."
    </p>
    <p>
      In the doorway he said: "Remember this, Miss Agnes. Both a crime of
      violence and a confession like the one in your hand are the products of
      impulse. They are not, either of them, premeditated. They are not the
      work, then, of a calculating or cautious nature. Look for a big, emotional
      type."
    </p>
    <p>
      It was a day or two after that that I made my visit to Miss Emily. I had
      stopped once before, to be told with an air of finality that the invalid
      was asleep. On this occasion I took with me a basket of fruit. I had half
      expected a refusal, but I was admitted.
    </p>
    <p>
      The Bullard girl was with Miss Emily. She had, I think, been kneeling
      beside the bed, and her eyes were red and swollen. But Miss Emily herself
      was as cool, as dainty and starched and fragile as ever. More so, I
      thought. She was thinner, and although it was a warm August day, a white
      silk shawl was wrapped around her shoulders and fastened with an amethyst
      brooch. In my clasp her thin hand felt hot and dry.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have been waiting for you," she said simply. She looked at Anne
      Bullard, and the message in her eyes was plain enough. But the girl
      ignored it. She stood across the bed from me and eyed me steadily.
    </p>
    <p>
      "My dear," said Miss Emily, in her high-bred voice, "if you have anything
      to do, Miss Blakiston will sit with me for a little while."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have nothing to do," said the girl doggedly. Perhaps this is not the
      word. She had more the look of endurance and supreme patience. There was
      no sharpness about her, although there was vigilance.
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Emily sighed, and I saw her eyes seek the Bible beside her. But she
      only said gently: "Then sit down, dear. You can work at my knitting if you
      like. My hands get very tired."
    </p>
    <p>
      She asked me questions about the house and the garden. The raspberries
      were usually quite good, and she was rather celebrated for her lettuces.
      If I had more than I needed, would I mind if Mr. Staley took a few in to
      the doctor, who was fond of them.
    </p>
    <p>
      The mention of Doctor Lingard took me back to the night of the burglary. I
      wondered if to tell Miss Emily would unduly agitate her. I think I would
      not have told her, but I caught the girl's eye, across the bed, raised
      from her knitting and fixed on me with a peculiar intensity. Suddenly it
      seemed to me that Miss Emily was surrounded by a conspiracy of silence,
      and it roused my antagonism.
    </p>
    <p>
      "There are plenty of lettuces," I said, "although a few were trampled by a
      runaway horse the other night. It is rather a curious story."
    </p>
    <p>
      So I told her of our night visitor. I told it humorously, lightly,
      touching on my own horror at finding I had been standing with my hand on
      the burglar's shoulder. But I was sorry for my impulse immediately, for I
      saw Miss Emily's body grow rigid, and her hands twist together. She did
      not look at me. She stared fixedly at the girl. Their eyes met.
    </p>
    <p>
      It was as if Miss Emily asked a question which the girl refused to answer.
      It was as certain as though it had been a matter of words instead of
      glances. It was over in a moment. Miss Bullard went back to her knitting,
      but Miss Emily lay still.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I think I should not have told you," I apologized. "I thought it might
      interest you. Of course nothing whatever was taken, and no damage done&mdash;except
      to the lettuces."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Anne," said Miss Emily, "will you bring me some fresh water?"
    </p>
    <p>
      The girl rose reluctantly, but she did not go farther than the top of the
      staircase, just beyond the door. We heard her calling to some one below,
      in her clear young voice, to bring the water, and the next moment she was
      back in the room. But Miss Emily had had the opportunity for one sentence.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I know now," she said quietly, "that you have found it."
    </p>
    <p>
      Anne Bullard was watching from the doorway, and it seemed to me, having
      got so far, I could not retreat. I must go on.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Miss Bullard," I said. "I would like to have just a short conversation
      with Miss Emily. It is about a private matter. I am sure you will not mind
      if I ask you&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I shall not go out."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Anne!" said Miss Emily sharply.
    </p>
    <p>
      The girl was dogged enough by that time. Both dogged and frightened, I
      felt. But she stood her ground.
    </p>
    <p>
      "She is not to be worried about anything," she insisted. "And she's not
      supposed to have visitors. That's the doctor's orders."
    </p>
    <p>
      I felt outraged and indignant, but against the stone wall of the girl's
      presence and her distrust I was helpless. I got up, with as much dignity
      as I could muster.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I should have been told that downstairs."
    </p>
    <p>
      "The woman's a fool," said Anne Bullard, with a sort of suppressed
      fierceness. She stood aside as, having said good-by to Miss Emily, I went
      out, and I felt that she hardly breathed until I had got safely to the
      street.
    </p>
    <p>
      Looking back, I feel that Emily Benton died at the hands of her friends.
      For she died, indeed, died in the act of trying to tell me what they had
      determined she should never tell. Died of kindness and misunderstanding.
      Died repressed, as she had lived repressed. Yet, I think, died calmly and
      bravely.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had made no further attempt to see her, and Maggie and I had taken up
      again the quiet course of our lives. The telephone did not ring of nights.
      The cat came and went, spending as I had learned, its days with Miss Emily
      and its nights with us. I have wondered since how many nights Miss Emily
      had spent in the low chair in that back hall, where the confession lay
      hidden, that the cat should feel it could sleep nowhere else.
    </p>
    <p>
      The days went by, warm days and cooler ones, but rarely rainy ones. The
      dust from the road settled thick over flowers and shrubbery. The lettuces
      wilted, and those that stood up in the sun were strong and bitter. By the
      end of August we were gasping in a hot dryness that cracked the skin and
      made any but cold food impossible.
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Emily lay through it all in her hot upper room in the village, and my
      attempt, through Doctor Lingard, to coax her back to the house by offering
      to leave it brought only a negative. "It would be better for her, you
      understand," the doctor said, over the telephone. "But she is very
      determined, and she insists on remaining where she is."
    </p>
    <p>
      And I believe this was the truth. They would surely have been glad to get
      rid of me, these friends of Miss Emily's.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have wondered since what they thought of me, Anne Bullard and the
      doctor, to have feared me as they did. I look in the mirror, and I see a
      middle-aged woman, with a determined nose, slightly inquisitive, and what
      I trust is a humorous mouth, for it has no other virtues. But they feared
      me. Perhaps long looking for a danger affects the mental vision. Anyhow,
      by the doctor's order, I was not allowed to call and see Miss Emily again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Then, one night, the heat suddenly lifted. One moment I was sitting on the
      veranda, lifeless and inert, and the next a cool wind, with a hint of
      rain, had set the shutters to banging and the curtains to flowing, like
      flags of truce, from the windows. The air was life, energy. I felt
      revivified.
    </p>
    <p>
      And something of the same sort must have happened to Miss Emily. She must
      have sat up among her pillows, her face fanned with the electric breeze,
      and made her determination to see me. Anne Bullard was at work, and she
      was free from observation.
    </p>
    <p>
      It must have been nine o'clock when she left the house, a shaken little
      figure in black, not as neat as usual, but hooked and buttoned, for all
      that, with no one will ever know what agony of old hands.
    </p>
    <p>
      She was two hours and a half getting to the house, and the rain came at
      ten o'clock. By half after eleven, when the doorbell rang, she was a
      sodden mass of wet garments, and her teeth were chattering when I led her
      into the library.
    </p>
    <p>
      She could not talk. The thing she had come to say was totally beyond her.
      I put her to bed in her own room. And two days later she died.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had made no protest when Anne Bullard presented herself at the door the
      morning after Miss Emily arrived, and, walking into the house, took
      sleepless charge of the sickroom. And I made no reference save once to the
      reason for the tragedy. That was the night Miss Emily died. Anne Bullard
      had called to me that she feared there was a change, and I went into the
      sickroom. There was a change, and I could only shake my head. She burst
      out at me then.
    </p>
    <p>
      "If only you had never taken this house!" she said. "You people with
      money, you think there is nothing you can not have. You came, and now
      look!"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Anne," I said with a bitterness I could not conceal, "Miss Emily is not
      young, and I think she is ready to go. But she has been killed by her
      friends. I wanted to help, but they would not allow me to."
    </p>
    <p>
      Toward morning there was nothing more to be done, and we sat together,
      listening to the stertorous breathing from the bed. Maggie, who had been
      up all night, had given me notice at three in the morning, and was
      upstairs packing her trunk.
    </p>
    <p>
      I went into my room, and brought back Miss Emily's confession.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Isn't it time," I said, "to tell me about this? I ought to know, I think,
      before she goes. If it is not true, you owe it to her, I think." But she
      shook her head.
    </p>
    <p>
      I looked at the confession, and from it to Miss Emily's pinched old face.
    </p>
    <p>
      "To whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman
      here in this house. I hope you will not find this until I am dead.
    </p>
    <p>
      "(Signed) EMILY BENTON."
    </p>
    <p>
      Anne was watching me. I went to the mantel and got a match, and then,
      standing near the bed, I lighted it and touched it to the paper. It burned
      slowly, a thin blue semicircle of fire that ate its way slowly across
      until there was but the corner I held. I dropped it into the fireplace and
      watched it turn to black ash.
    </p>
    <p>
      I may have fancied it&mdash;I am always fancying things about Miss Emily&mdash;but
      I will always think that she knew. She drew a longer, quieter breath, and
      her eyes, fixed and staring, closed. I think she died in the first sleep
      she had had in twenty-four hours.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had expected Anne Bullard to show emotion, for no one could doubt her
      attachment to Miss Emily. But she only stood stoically by the bed for a
      moment and then, turning swiftly, went to the wall opposite and took down
      from the wall the walnut-framed photograph Mrs. Graves had commented on.
    </p>
    <p>
      Anne Bullard stood with the picture in her hand, looking at it. And
      suddenly she broke into sobs. It was stormy weeping, and I got the
      impression that she wept, not for Miss Emily, but for many other things&mdash;as
      though the piled-up grief of years had broken out at last.
    </p>
    <p>
      She took the photograph away, and I never saw it again.
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Emily was buried from her home. I obliterated myself, and her
      friends, who were, I felt, her murderers, came in and took charge. They
      paid me the tribute of much politeness, but no cordiality, and I think
      they felt toward me as I felt toward them. They blamed me with the whole
      affair.
    </p>
    <p>
      She left her property all to Anne Bullard, to the astonished rage of the
      congregation, which had expected the return of its dimes and quarters, no
      doubt, in the shape of a new altar, or perhaps an organ.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Not a cent to keep up the mausoleum or anything," Mrs. Graves confided to
      me. "And nothing to the church. All to that telephone-girl, who comes from
      no one knows where! It's enough to make her father turn over in his grave.
      It has set people talking, I can tell you."
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie's mental state during the days preceding the funeral was curious.
      She coupled the most meticulous care as to the preparations for the
      ceremony, and a sort of loving gentleness when she decked Miss Emily's
      small old frame for its last rites, with suspicion and hatred of Miss
      Emily living. And this suspicion she held also against Anne Bullard.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet she did not want to leave the house. I do not know just what she
      expected to find. We were cleaning up preparatory to going back to the
      city, and I felt that at least a part of Maggie's enthusiasm for corners
      was due to a hope of locating more concealed papers. She was rather less
      than polite to the Bullard girl, who was staying on at my invitation&mdash;because
      the village was now flagrantly unfriendly and suspicious of her. And for
      some strange reason, the fact that Miss Emily's cat followed Anne
      everywhere convinced Maggie that her suspicions were justified.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It's like this, Miss Agnes," she said one morning, leaning on the handle
      of a floor brush. "She had some power over the old lady, and that's how
      she got the property. And I am saying nothing, but she's no Christian,
      that girl. To see her and that cat going out night after night, both
      snooping along on their tiptoes&mdash;it ain't normal."
    </p>
    <p>
      I had several visits from Martin Sprague since Miss Emily's death, and
      after a time I realized that he was interested in Anne. She was quite
      attractive in her mourning clothes, and there was something about her, not
      in feature, but in neatness and in the way her things had of, well,
      staying in place, that reminded me of Miss Emily herself. It was rather
      surprising, too, to see the way she fitted into her new surroundings and
      circumstances.
    </p>
    <p>
      But I did not approve of Martin's attraction to her. She had volunteered
      no information about herself, she apparently had no people. She was a
      lady, I felt, although, with the exception of her new mourning, her
      clothing was shabby and her linen even coarse.
    </p>
    <p>
      She held the key to the confession. I knew that. And I had no more hope of
      getting it from her than I had from the cat. So I prepared to go back to
      the city, with the mystery unsolved. It seemed a pity, when I had got so
      far with it. I had reconstructed a situation out of such bricks as I had,
      the books in the cellar, Mrs. Graves's story of the river, the confession,
      possibly the note-book and the handkerchief. I had even some material left
      over in the form of the night intruder, who may or may not have been the
      doctor. And then, having got so far, I had had to stop for lack of other
      bricks.
    </p>
    <p>
      A day or two before I went back to the city, Maggie came to me with a
      folded handkerchief in her hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Is that yours?" she asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      I disclaimed it. It was not very fine, and looked rather yellow.
    </p>
    <p>
      "S'got a name on it," Maggie volunteered. "Wright, I think it is. 'Tain't
      hers, unless she's picked it up somewhere. It's just come out of the
      wash."
    </p>
    <p>
      Maggie's eyes were snapping with suspicion. "There ain't any Wrights
      around here, Miss Agnes," she said. "I sh'd say she's here under a false
      name. Wright's likely hers."
    </p>
    <p>
      In tracing the mystery of the confession, I find that three apparently
      disconnected discoveries paved the way to its solution. Of these the
      handkerchief came first.
    </p>
    <p>
      I was inclined to think that in some manner the handkerchief I had found
      in the book in the cellar had got into the wash. But it was where I had
      placed it for safety, in the wall-closet in the library. I brought it out
      and compared the two. They were unlike, save in the one regard. The name
      "Wright" was clear enough on the one Maggie had found. With it as a guide,
      the other name was easily seen to be the same. Moreover, both had been
      marked by the same hand.
    </p>
    <p>
      Yet, on Anne Bullard being shown the one Maggie had found, she disclaimed
      it. "Don't you think some one dropped it at the funeral?" she asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      But I thought, as I turned away, that she took a step toward me. When I
      stopped, however, and faced about, she was intent on something outside the
      window.
    </p>
    <p>
      And so it went. I got nowhere. And now, by way of complication, I felt my
      sympathy for Anne's loneliness turning to genuine interest. She was so
      stoical, so repressed, and so lonely. And she was tremendously proud. Her
      pride was vaguely reminiscent of Miss Emily's. She bore her ostracism
      almost fiercely, yet there were times when I felt her eyes on me,
      singularly gentle and appealing. Yet she volunteered nothing about
      herself.
    </p>
    <p>
      I intended to finish the history of Bolivar County before I left. I
      dislike not finishing a book. Besides, this one fascinated me&mdash;the
      smug complacence and almost loud virtue of the author, his satisfaction in
      Bolivar County, and his small hits at the world outside, his patronage to
      those not of it. And always, when I began to read, I turned to the
      inscription in Miss Emily's hand, the hand of the confession&mdash;and I
      wondered if she had really believed it all.
    </p>
    <p>
      So on this day I found the name Bullard in the book. It had belonged to
      the Reverend Samuel Thaddeus's grandmother, and he distinctly stated that
      she was the last of her line. He inferred, indeed, that since the line was
      to end, it had chosen a fitting finish in his immediate progenitor.
    </p>
    <p>
      That night, at dinner, I said, "Anne, are there any Bullards in this
      neighborhood now?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "I have never heard of any. But I have not been here long."
    </p>
    <p>
      "It is not a common name," I persisted.
    </p>
    <p>
      But she received my statement in silence. She had, as I have said, rather
      a gift for silence.
    </p>
    <p>
      That afternoon I was wandering about the garden snipping faded roses with
      Miss Emily's garden shears, when I saw Maggie coming swiftly toward me.
      When she caught my eye, she beckoned to me. "Walk quiet, Miss Agnes," she
      said, "and don't say I didn't warn you. She's in the library."
    </p>
    <p>
      So, feeling hatefully like a spy, I went quietly over the lawn toward the
      library windows. They were long ones, to the floor, and at first I made
      out nothing. Then I saw Anne. She was on her knees, following the border
      of the carpet with fingers that examined it, inch by inch.
    </p>
    <p>
      She turned, as if she felt our eyes on her, and saw us. I shall never
      forget her face. She looked stricken. I turned away. There was something
      in her eyes that made me think of Miss Emily, lying among her pillows and
      waiting for me to say the thing she was dreading to hear.
    </p>
    <p>
      I sent Maggie away with a gesture. There was something in her pursed lips
      that threatened danger. For I felt then as if I had always known it and
      only just realized I knew it, that somewhere in that room lay the answer
      to all questions; lay Miss Emily's secret. And I did not wish to learn it.
      It was better to go on wondering, to question and doubt and decide and
      decide again. I was, I think, in a state of nervous terror by that time,
      terror and apprehension.
    </p>
    <p>
      While Miss Emily lived, I had hoped to help. But now it seemed too
      hatefully like accusing when she could not defend herself. And there is
      another element that I am bound to acknowledge. There was an element of
      jealousy of Anne Bullard. Both of us had tried to help Miss Emily. She had
      foiled my attempt in her own endeavor, a mistaken endeavor, I felt. But
      there was now to be no blemish on my efforts. I would no longer pry or
      question or watch. It was too late.
    </p>
    <p>
      In a curious fashion, each of us wished, I think, to prove the quality of
      her tenderness for the little old lady who was gone beyond all human
      tenderness.
    </p>
    <p>
      So that evening, after dinner, I faced Anne in the library.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why not let things be as they are, Anne?" I asked. "It can do no good.
      Whatever it is, and I do not know, why not let things rest?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "Some one may find it," she replied. "Some one who does not care, as I&mdash;as
      we care."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Are you sure there is something?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "She told me, near the last. I only don't know just where it is."
    </p>
    <p>
      "And if you find it?"
    </p>
    <p>
      "It is a letter. I shall burn it without reading. Although," she drew a
      long breath, "I know what it contains."
    </p>
    <p>
      "If in any way it comes into my hands," I assured her, "I shall let you
      know. And I shall not read it."
    </p>
    <p>
      She looked thoughtful rather than grateful.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I hardly know," she said. "I think she would want you to read it if it
      came to you. It explains so much. And it was a part of her plan. You know,
      of course, that she had a plan. It was a sort of arrangement"&mdash;she
      hesitated&mdash;"it was a sort of pact she made with God, if you know what
      I mean."
    </p>
    <p>
      That night Maggie found the letter.
    </p>
    <p>
      I had gone upstairs, and Anne was, I think, already asleep. I heard what
      sounded like distant hammering, and I went to the door. Some one was in
      the library below. The light was shining out into the hall, and my
      discovery of that was followed almost immediately by the faint splintering
      of wood. Rather outraged than alarmed, I went back for my dressing-gown,
      and as I left the room, I confronted Maggie in the hallway. She had an
      envelope in one hand, and a hatchet in the other.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I found it," she said briefly.
    </p>
    <p>
      She held it out, and I took it. On the outside, in Miss Emily's writing,
      it said, "To whom it may concern." It was sealed.
    </p>
    <p>
      I turned it over in my hand, while Maggie talked.
    </p>
    <p>
      "When I saw that girl crawling around," she said, "seems to me I
      remembered all at once seeing Miss Emily, that day I found her, running
      her finger along the baseboard. Says I to myself, there's something more
      hidden, and she don't know where it is. But I do. So I lifted the
      baseboard, and this was behind it."
    </p>
    <p>
      Anne heard her from her room, and she went out soon afterward. I heard her
      going down the stairs and called to her. But she did not answer. I closed
      the door on Maggie and stood in my room, staring at the envelope.
    </p>
    <p>
      I have wondered since whether Miss Emily, had she lived, would have put
      the responsibility on Providence for the discovery of her pitiful story.
      So many of us blame the remorseless hand of destiny for what is so
      manifestly our own doing. It was her own anxiety, surely, that led to the
      discovery in each instance, yet I am certain that old Emily Benton died,
      convinced that a higher hand than any on earth had directed the discovery
      of the confession.
    </p>
    <p>
      Miss Emily has been dead for more than a year now. To publish the letter
      can do her no harm. In a way, too, I feel, it may be the fulfilment of
      that strange pact she made. For just as discovery was the thing she most
      dreaded, so she felt that by paying her penalty here she would be saved
      something beyond&mdash;that sort of spiritual book-keeping which most of
      us call religion. Anne Sprague&mdash;she is married now to Martin has, I
      think, some of Miss Emily's feeling about it, although she denies it. But
      I am sure that in consenting to the recording of Miss Emily's story, she
      feels that she is doing what that gentle fatalist would call following the
      hand of Providence.
    </p>
    <p>
      I read the letter that night in the library where the light was good. It
      was a narrative, not a letter, strictly speaking. It began abruptly.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I must set down this thing as it happened. I shall write it fully,
      because I must get it off my mind. I find that I am always composing it,
      and that my lips move when I walk along the street or even when I am
      sitting in church. How terrible if I should some day speak it aloud. My
      great-grandmother was a Catholic. She was a Bullard. Perhaps it is from
      her that I have this overwhelming impulse to confession. And lately I have
      been terrified. I must tell it, or I shall shriek it out some day, in the
      church, during the Litany. 'From battle and murder, and from sudden death,
      Good Lord, deliver us.'"
    </p>
    <p>
      (There was a space here. When the writing began again, time had elapsed.
      The ink was different, the writing more controlled.)
    </p>
    <p>
      "What a terrible thing hate is. It is a poison. It penetrates the mind and
      the body and changes everything. I, who once thought I could hate no one,
      now find that hate is my daily life, my getting up and lying down, my
      sleep, my waking.
    </p>
    <p>
      "'From hatred, envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord,
      deliver us.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "Must one suffer twice for the same thing? Is it not true that we pay but
      one penalty? Surely we pay either here or beyond, but not both. Oh, not
      both!
    </p>
    <p>
      "Will this ever be found? Where shall I hide it? For I have the feeling
      that I must hide it, not destroy it&mdash;as the Catholic buries his sin
      with the priest. My father once said that it is the healthful humiliation
      of the confessional that is its reason for existing. If humiliation be a
      virtue&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      I have copied the confession to this point, but I find I can not go on.
      She was so merciless to herself, so hideously calm, so exact as to dates
      and hours. She had laid her life on the table and dissected it&mdash;for
      the Almighty!
    </p>
    <p>
      I heard the story that night gently told, and somehow I feel that that is
      the version by which Miss Emily will be judged.
    </p>
    <p>
      "If humiliation be a virtue&mdash;" I read and was about to turn the page,
      when I heard Anne in the hall. She was not alone. I recognized Doctor
      Lingard's voice.
    </p>
    <p>
      Five minutes later I was sitting opposite him, almost knee to knee, and he
      was telling me how Miss Emily had come to commit her crime. Anne Bullard
      was there, standing on the hearth rug. She kept her eyes on me, and after
      a time I realized that these two simple people feared me, feared for Miss
      Emily's gentle memory, feared that I&mdash;good heaven!&mdash;would make
      the thing public.
    </p>
    <p>
      "First of all, Miss Blakiston," said the doctor, "one must have known the
      family to realize the situation&mdash;its pride in its own uprightness.
      The virtue of the name, what it stood for in Bolivar County. She was
      raised on that. A Benton could do no wrong, because a Benton would do no
      wrong.
    </p>
    <p>
      "But there is another side, also. I doubt if any girl was ever raised as
      Miss Emily was. She&mdash;well, she knew nothing. At fifty she was as
      childlike and innocent as she was at ten. She had practically never heard
      of vice. The ugly things, for her, did not exist.
    </p>
    <p>
      "And, all the time, there was a deep and strong nature underneath. She
      should have married and had children, but there was no one here for her to
      marry. I," he smiled faintly, "I asked for her myself, and was forbidden
      the house for years as a result.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You have heard of the brother? But of course you have. I know you have
      found the books. Such an existence as the family life here was bound to
      have its reactions. Carlo was a reaction. Twenty-five years ago he ran
      away with a girl from the village. He did not marry her. I believe he was
      willing at one time, but his father opposed it violently. It would have
      been to recognize a thing he refused to recognize." He turned suddenly to
      Anne. "Don't you think this is going to be painful?" he asked.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Why? I know it all."
    </p>
    <p>
      "Very well. This girl&mdash;the one Carlo ran away with&mdash;determined
      to make the family pay for that refusal. She made them actually pay, year
      by year. Emily knew about it. She had to pinch to make the payments. The
      father sat in a sort of detached position, in the center of Bolivar
      County, and let her bear the brunt of it. I shall never forget the day she
      learned there was a child. It&mdash;well, it sickened her. She had not
      known about those things. And I imagine, if we could know, that that was
      the beginning of things.
    </p>
    <p>
      "And all the time there was the necessity for secrecy. She had never known
      deceit, and now she was obliged to practice it constantly. She had no one
      to talk to. Her father, beyond making entries of the amounts paid to the
      woman in the case, had nothing to do with it. She bore it all, year after
      year. And it ate, like a cancer.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Remember, I never knew. I, who would have done anything for her&mdash;she
      never told me. Carlo lived hard and came back to die. The father went. She
      nursed them both. I came every day, and I never suspected. Only, now and
      then, I wondered about her. She looked burned. I don't know any other
      word.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Then, the night after Carlo had been buried, she telephoned for me. It
      was eleven o'clock, She met me, out there in the hall, and she said,
      'John, I have killed somebody.'
    </p>
    <p>
      "I thought she was out of her mind. But she opened the door, and&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      He turned and glanced at Anne.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Please!" she said.
    </p>
    <p>
      "It was Anne's mother. You have guessed it about Anne by now, of course.
      It seems that the funeral had taken the money for the payment that was
      due, and there had been a threat of exposure. And Emily had reached the
      breaking-point. I believe what she said&mdash;that she had no intention
      even of striking her. You can't take the act itself. You have to take
      twenty-five years into account. Anyhow, she picked up a chair and knocked
      the woman down. And it killed her." He ran his fingers through his heavy
      hair. "It should not have killed her," he reflected. "There must have been
      some other weakness, heart or something. I don't know. But it was a heavy
      chair. I don't see how Emily&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      His voice trailed off.
    </p>
    <p>
      "There we were," he said, with a long breath. "Poor Emily, and the other
      poor soul, neither of them fundamentally at fault, both victims."
    </p>
    <p>
      "I know about the books," I put in hastily. I could not have him going
      over that again.
    </p>
    <p>
      "You knew that, too!" He gazed at me.
    </p>
    <p>
      "Poor Emily," he said. "She tried to atone. She brought Anne here, and
      told her the whole story. It was a bad time&mdash;all round. But at last
      Anne saw the light. The only one who would not see the light was Emily.
      And at last she hit on this confession idea. I suspected it when she
      rented the house. When I accused her of it, she said: 'I have given it to
      Providence to decide. If the confession is found, I shall know I am to
      suffer. And I shall not lift a hand to save myself.'"
    </p>
    <p>
      So it went through the hours. Her fear, which I still think was the terror
      that communicated itself to me; the various clues, which she, poor victim,
      had overlooked; the articles laid carelessly in the book she had been
      reading and accidentally hidden with her brother's forbidden literature;
      the books themselves, with all of five years to destroy them, and left
      untouched; her own anxiety about the confession in the telephone-box,
      which led to our finding it; her espionage of the house by means of the
      telephone; the doctor's night visit in search of the confession; the daily
      penance for five years of the dead woman's photograph in her room&mdash;all
      of these&mdash;and her occasional weakenings, poor soul, when she tried to
      change her handwriting against discovery, and refused to allow the second
      telephone to be installed.
    </p>
    <p>
      How clear it was! How, in a way, inevitable! And, too, how really best for
      her it had turned out. For she had made a pact, and she died believing
      that discovery here had come, and would take the place of punishment
      beyond.
    </p>
    <p>
      Martin Sprague came the next day. I was in the library alone, and he was
      with Anne in the garden, when Maggie came into the room with a saucer of
      crab-apple jelly.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I wish you'd look at this," she said. "If it's cooked too much, it gets
      tough and&mdash;" She straightened suddenly and stood staring out through
      a window.
    </p>
    <p>
      "I'd thank you to look out and see the goings-on in our garden," she said
      sharply. "In broad daylight, too. I&mdash;"
    </p>
    <p>
      But I did not hear what else Maggie had to say. I glanced out, and Martin
      had raised the girl's face to his and was kissing her, gently and very
      tenderly.
    </p>
    <p>
      And then&mdash;and again, as with fear, it is hard to put into words&mdash;I
      felt come over me such a wave of contentment and happiness as made me
      close my eyes with the sheer relief and joy of it. All was well. The past
      was past, and out of its mistakes had come a beautiful thing. And, like
      the fear, this joy was not mine. It came to me. I picked it up&mdash;a
      thought without words.
    </p>
    <p>
      Sometimes I think about it, and I wonder&mdash;did little Miss Emily know?
    </p>
    <p>
      <br /><br /><br /><br />
    </p>
<pre xml:space="preserve">





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