The Confession....................................................................................................................................................1

Mary Roberts Rinehart .............................................................................................................................1

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 churchbells and considered it a personal summons to eternity until it was shown

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 carpets that reached to the very baseboards and gave under one's feet with the yielding of heavy

padding beneath were bright under beds and wardrobes, while in the centers of the rooms they had faded

Maggie, I remember, on our arrival moved a chair from the wall in the library, and immediately put it back

"It's nice and clean, Miss Agnes," she said. "A I kind of feel that a little dirt would make it more homelike."

"I'm sure I don't see why," I replied, rather sharply, "I've lived in a tolerably clean house most of my life."

Maggie, however, was digging a heel into the padded carpet. She had chosen a sunny place for the

"Germs!" she said. "Just what I expected. We'd better bring the vacuum cleaner out from the city, Miss

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

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 golflinks. 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

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

I faced the agent downstairs in the parlor, after I had gone over the house. Miss Emily Benton had not

"But she is giving the house away," I exclaimed. "Those bathrooms have cost much more than she will get

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 yardstick 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."

With which absurd sentence we went out the front door, and I saw the pasture, which decided me.

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.

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

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 all these were as indicative of Emily Benton as well, as the letter was not.

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.

"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,

"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

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 carriageride from the city with complacency.

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

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

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

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

"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

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 as though perhaps a wave of uneasiness, spreading from

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 if the intention of

writing a letter to an absent friend can spread itself halfway 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.

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

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

In Miss Emily, it took the form of how strange a word to use in connection with her! of furtive

watchfulness. I felt that Maggie's entrance, with nothing more momentous than the teatray, 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

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 well, unspotted seems to be the word 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!

Indeed, it was not quite normal, nor was I. For by that time the middle of July it was before I figured out as

much as I have set down in five minutes 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

"Not very well." He picked up his coffeecup, and smiled over it rather sheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to

thinking about things the furniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many people have sat in the chairs

Maggie, who was bringing in the toast, gave a sort of low moan, which she turned into a cough.

"There have been twentythree deaths in it in the last forty years, Mr. Willie," she volunteered. "That's

"Put down that toast before you drop it, Maggie," I said. "You're shaking all over. And go out and shut the

"Very well," she said, with a meekness behind which she was both indignant and frightened. "But there is one

"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

Willie is not subtle. He is a practical young man with a growing family, and a tendency the last year or two to

"Don't you think it's rather isolated?" he asked finally. "Just you three women here?" I had taken Delia, the

"We have a telephone," I said, rather loftily. "Although " 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.

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

"Once or twice we have found the thing on the floor in the morning. It couldn't blow over or knock itself

"Probably the cat," he said, with the patient air of a man arguing with an unreasonable woman. "Of course,"

he added we were passing the churchyard then, dominated by what the village called the Benton

"mosolem" "there's a chance that those deadandgone Bentons resent anything as modern as a telephone.

"I'm going to tell you something, Willie," I said. "I am afraid of the telephone."

He was completely incredulous. I felt rather ridiculous, standing there in the sunlight of that summer Sabbath

"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 "

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 have to go downstairs at night and answer it," I added, rather feebly. "It's on my nerves, I think."

"I should think it is," he said, with a note of wonder in his voice. "It doesn't sound like you. A telephone!"

"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 you get all your news over

it, good and bad." He had difficulty, I think, in finding the words he wanted. "It's it's vital," he said. "So you

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

That my analysis of my impression; 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:

I realized it even then, although I did not consider it serious, as is evidenced by the fact that I follow it with a

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 stainedglass window to Carlo Benton the name

came like an echo from the forgotten past 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.

She sat quite alone, impeccably neat, even to her profile. She was so orderly, so well balanced, one stitch of

her handsewed 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

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 she is

very high church and always attends 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

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

which sounds like nonsense and is as near as I can come to getting it down in words.

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

In every instance the experience was identical. The telephone never rang the second time. When I went

downstairs to answer it I did not always go there was the buzzing of the wire, and there was nothing else.

It was on the twentyfourth 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.

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

On more than one evening she came to the library door, with an expression of mentally looking over her

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

"Now, see here, Maggie, I want you to overcome this feeling of " I hesitated "of fear. When you have

"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

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

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 themelves with a fourpost

Of the two sorts of fear, Delia's and Maggie's symptoms were subjective. Mine, I still feel, were objective.

It was not long before the beginning of August, and during a lull in the telephone matter, that I began to

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 sewingbasket 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

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 sewingbasket or moving the dictionary two inches on the

Yet the feeling persisted, and on the second of August I find this entry in my journal:

Righthand brass, eight inches; lefthand brass, seven inches; carvedwood Italian five and three quarter

inches each; old glass on mantelpiece 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

I should, no doubt, have set a watch on my nightly visitor after making this discovery and one that was

apparently connected with it nothing less than Delia's report that there were candledroppings 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.

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

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

I have seen one of Willie's boys waken up at night screaming with a terror he could not describe. Well, it was

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

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

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 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,

The effect of the discovery on me was 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

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:

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.

"For heaven's sake!" I cried. "Stop that noise, Maggie." I felt as though my eyes were starting from my head.

"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

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

"Don't!" I said. And my voice sounded thick even to my own ears. "Maggie I can't stand it!"

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 and I think this was the feeling I had that some other control was

in charge. Not the Agnes Blakiston I knew, but another Agnes Blakiston, perhaps, was exerting a temporary

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.

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

"Thought I would just run in and see you, he said. "Mother told me you were here. By George, Miss Agnes,

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 sleepwalking.

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 maybe just holding the thing down and pretending it is not there makes us nervous and

up it pops, like the ghost of a buried body, and raises hell. You don't mind that, do you?" he added anxiously.

"But," I demanded irritably, "who rings the telephone at night? I daresay you don't contend that I go out at

And so bad was my nervous condition by that time, so undermined was my selfconfidence, that I was not

certain! And this in face of the fact that it invariably roused Maggie as well as myself.

On the eleventh of August Miss Emily came to tea. The date does not matter, but by following the

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 matteroffact explanation had helped me. But my own theory had always been the one I recorded

at the beginning of this narrative that I caught and well, registered is a good word that I registered an

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 knittingbag 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,

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.

I led her into the house, and she produced a gay bit of knitting, a baby afghan, by the signs. She smiled at me

"I am always one baby behind," she explained and fell to work rapidly. She had lovely hands, and I suspected

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

"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

"Telephone?" she inquired. "Why, no. It has always done very well. Of course, after a heavy snow in the

She had a fashion of leaving her sentences unfinished. They trailed off, without any abrupt break.

Some of my irritation doubtless got into my voice, for Miss Emily suddenly drew away and stared at me.

She had gone pale. I saw that now. And quite suddenly she dropped her knittingbag. When I restored it to

She considered, and began again. "Why not just ignore it? If some one is playing a malicious trick on you, the

Her hands were shaking, although her voice was quiet. I saw that when she tried to tie the ribbons of the bag.

And I wondered at this, in so gentle a soul there was a hint of anger in her tones. There was an edge to

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 nonplussed. It

was over her unqualified refusal to allow me to install a branch wire to my bedroom.

"I am sorry." Her voice had a note of finality. "I daresay I am oldfashioned, but I do not like changes. I

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.

I dropped the subject, a trifle ruffled, I confess, and went upstairs to fetch a box in which Miss Emily was to

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

She was still there when Miss Emily had gone, blowing on the mirror and polishing it. And I took her to task

"You practically threw her muffins at her," I said. "And I must speak again about the cups "

"What does she come snooping around for, anyhow?" she broke in. "Aren't we paying for her house? Didn't

"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

It was that day, I think, that I put fresh candles in all the holders downstairs. I had made a resolution like this,

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 footprints 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

At tenthirty 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

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.

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

"Miss Agnes," she beseeched, "you go to bed and don't listen. There'll be nothing there, for all your trouble,"

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

I went back to the telephone. Something that was living and moving was there. I saw its eyes, lower than

mine, reflecting the lamp like twin lights. I was frightened, but still it was not the fear. The twin lights leaped

forward and proved to be the eyes of Miss Emily's cat, which had been sleeping on the stand!

I answered the telephone. To my surprise it was Miss Emily herself, a quiet and very dignified voice which

"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

She seemed, having got me there, unwilling to ring off. I got a curious effect of reluctance over the telephone,

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 culdesac 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 telephonestand, was as cheering as the singing of a kettle

on a stove. On the rack near me my garden hat and an old Paisley shawl made a grotesque human effigy.

I sat back in the low wicker chair and surveyed the hallway. Why not, I considered, do away now with the

fear of it? If I could conquer it like this at midnight, I need never succumb again to it in the light.

The cat leaped to the stand beside me and stood there, waiting. He was an intelligent animal, and I am like a

good many spinsters. I am not more fond of cats than other people, but I understand them better. And it

seemed to me that he and I were going through some familiar program, of which a part had been neglected.

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.

I took up my vigil. I had been the victim of a fear I was determined to conquer. The house was quiet. Maggie

And then 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

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.

The cat leaped to his feet. Somehow I reached forward and took down the receiver.

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, fo1lowed 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

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,

"What number, please?" she repeated, in a bored tone. There is nothing in all the world so bored as the voice

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 and as difficult to describe as a chill, for

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 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 she was the soul of convention 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.

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 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 a sort of

exaltation. She was not, that morning, the Miss Emily who ran a finger along her baseboards to see if we

"I think," she said at last, "that I must telephone for Mr. Staley, I am never very strong in hot weather."

"Please let me call him, for you, Miss Emily." I am not a young woman, and she was at least sixtyfive. But,

because she was so small and frail, I felt almost a motherly anxiety for her that morning.

"I think I should like to do it, if you don't mind. We are old friends. He always comes promptly when I call

She went back alone, and I waited in the doorway. When she came out, she was smiling, and there was more

Now, without any warning, something that had been seething since her breathless arrival took shape in my

mind, and became 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 what?

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

"One of earth's saints," the rector had said to me on Sunday morning. "A good woman, Miss Blakiston, and a

Suspicion is like the rain. It falls on the just and on the unjust. And that morning I began to suspect Miss

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

"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

She chattered on, and my suspicions grew more and more shadowy. They would have gone, I think, had not

"A sack of flour," she said, "and some green vegetables, and Miss Agnes, that woman was down on her

knees beside the telephone! and bluing for the laundry, and I guess that's all."

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

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

I hesitated. She so obviously did not want it installed. And was I to submit meekly to the fear again, without

"I think not, dear Miss Emily," I said at last, smiling at her drawn face. "Why should I disturb your lovely old

"But I want you to do just what you think best," she protested. She had put her hands together. It was almost a

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.

The hack was gone, of course. But I may have imagined it I thought I saw Miss Emily peering at me from

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

sugarbowl 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 gasbills. But she had

reached the end of her tether, and you could grate a lemon on her most anywhere, she was that covered with

"Gooseflesh about what?" I demanded. "And either throw the sugar to me or come closer."

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

The afternoon was quiet. Maggie and the cook were in the throes of jellymaking, and I had picked up a

narrative history of the county, written most pedantically, although with here and there a touch of heavy

On the flyleaf she had inscribed, "Written by my dear father during the last year of his life, and published

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 selfsacrificing daughter, a woman both loving and beloved, that was

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.

"Well!" I said. "Don't tell me you're not dressed yet. You've just got about time for the afternoon train."

"You might just take a look at this, Miss Agnes," she said. "It jells around the edges, but in the middle "

"I'll send your trunk tomorrow," I said, "and you'd better let Delia make the jelly alone. You haven't much

"Miss Agnes," she said, "that woman's never made a glass of jelly in her life before. She didn't even know

I picked up "Bolivar County" and opened it, but I could see that the hands holding the saucer were shaking.

"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

But she was past sarcasm. She placed the saucer on a table and rolled her stained hands in her apron.

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.

"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."

What on earth for?" I demanded as ungrammatical and hardly less uneasy than Maggie.

"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

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 telephonestand, and had, on seeing Maggie, observed that she had dropped the

"Which I don't believe. Her gloves were on the stand. If you'll come back, Miss Agnes, I'll show you how she

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, jellystains, and suspicion.

"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

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

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 twentyfive~cent piece under a

I forbade it at once, and ordered her back to the kitchen, and after a final squint along the carpet, head fiat,

"I'll get the jelly off," she said, "and then maybe a hat pin'll reach it. I can see the edge of it."

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.

I was roused by the feeling that some one was staring at me. My eyes focused first on the icepick, then, as I

I groaned inwardly. But, because submission to Maggie's tyranny has become a firm habit with me, I rose. I

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.

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 batteryjars had been removed, and lay on its side. The batteryjars were uncovered,

giving an effect of mystery unveiled, a sort of shamelessness, of destroyed illusion.

Maggie pointed. "There's a paper under one of the jars," she said. "I haven't touched it, but I know well

I have not questioned Maggie on this point, but I am convinced that she expected to find a sort of final

The box had accumulated the flucculent floating particles of months, possibly years lint from the hail 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.

I lifted the jar and picked up the paper. It was folded and refolded until it was not much larger than a

thumbnail, a rather stiff paper crossed with faint blue lines. I am not sure that I would have opened it it

had been so plainly in hiding, and was so obviously not my affair had not Maggie suddenly gasped and

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

It was not note paper. It was apparently torn from a tablet of glazed and ruled paper 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

"To Whom it may concern: On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a woman (here) in this house. I hope you

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 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.

"The brass of her," she said, in a thin, terrified voice. "And sitting in church like the rest of us. Oh, my God,

"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

But she was beyond apprehension. She was literal, too. She saw, not Miss Emily unbelievably associated

After a time I got rid of her, and sat down to think in the library. Rather I sat down to reason with myself.

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 flyleaf of "Fifty Years in Bolivar

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

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 semiholy ground. She dusts books with more caution than china, and her respect for a

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 perhaps this is

nearer as if, after writing in a certain way for sixty years, she had tried to change her style.

All my logic ended in one conclusion. She must have known the confession was there. Therefore the chances

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,

Yet, if I could believe m.y eyes, five years before she had killed a woman in this very house. Possibly in the

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,

I was not terrified. And indeed the fear never returned. In all the course of my investigations, I was never

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.

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.

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

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.

Maggie roused me early. The morning sunlight was just creeping into the room, and the air was still cool with

"Miss Agnes," she demanded, standing over me, "did you let the cat out last night?"

"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."

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.

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

"I have other things to worry me, Martin," I said gravely, and let him into the library.

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.

He took the paper when I offered it to him, and examined it carefully by a window. Then he stood looking out

"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

"Two. Maggie is one. She hates the country. She is afraid of old houses. And she sees in this house only the

"You only think that. But to go further you have been receiving waves of apprehension from another source

"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 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

"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 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 the murder of a woman."

"You do not know her," I maintained doggedly. And drew, as best I could, a sketch of Miss Emily, while he

"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."

"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 he tapped the

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.

"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

Late that afternoon, as it happened, I was enabled to learn something of this from a visiting neighbor, and

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

"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."

I replied, with some asperity, that I had not been anxious to take the house, but that Miss Emily had been so

"She is quite the most loved person in the valley," she said. "And she loves the place. It is I cannot imagine

After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as the cause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.

"It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agent wished her to ask more, but she refused."

She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk gloves. And when she spoke again it was of

"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 "

Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the ecclesiastical library of the late

"It was not only that," she said. "When he was 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

Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedly toward the door.

"In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all his books into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley

the hackman at the station, you know and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We went away with

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

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

"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

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

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

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 that Miss Emily could not possibly have done

the thing she claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.

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

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 jellyglasses. It seemed,

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

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

"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

And, indeed, by that time Maggie had convinced herself that she had known all along there was something in

"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

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

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.

I looked at the window. It was extremely ugly, and very devout. And under it was the dead man's name and

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

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 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.

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

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.

And some time, during that day or the night that followed, little Miss Emily claimed to have committed her

I went home thoughtfully. At the gate I turned and looked back. The Benton Mausoleum was warm in the

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

Therefore, after much protesting that night, I agreed to visit the fruit cellar, and select a spot for the

temporary entombing of thirtysix jelly tumblers, which would have been thirtyseven 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.

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 potatobin. In another corner two or three old pews from the church,

evidently long discarded and showing weatherstains, as though they had once served as garden benches,

were upended against the whitewashed wall. The fruitcloset, built in of lumber, occupied one entire end,

Maggie had, she said, found it locked and had had an itinerant locksmith fit a key to it.

"It's all scrubbed and ready," she said. "I found that preserved melonrind 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

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

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

At two o'clock, finding myself unable to sleep, I got up and put on my dressinggown 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

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.

I have no explanation for this. And it is quite possible that I might have had it, to find at the end nothing more

And indeed, at first sight, what awaited me in the locked closet amounted to anticlimax. 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

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

"If it was burglars," she added, "you're that upandready, Miss Agnes, that I knew if I waked you you'd be

I got her away at last, and she went, muttering something about digging up the cellar floor and finding an

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.

"This is a nice place we've come to," she said, acidly. "Murder in the telephone and antiChrist in the fruit

"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

I took up the book. It was wellworn, and in the front, in a heavy masculine hand, the owner had written his

name written it large, a bit defiantly, perhaps. It had taken both courage and conviction to bring such a

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.

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.

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 teatray 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

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

"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

"It is a most interesting story," I observed. "What delicious tea, Mrs. Graves! And then you fastened up the

"My dear," Mrs. Graves said solemnly, "it was not a ceremony. It was a rite a significant rite."

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 oldfashioned 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

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

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

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.

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 well, afraid of hurting her. I had the feeling, I know, that I must protect her. And that feeling never left

"I think you must know, my dear," she said, from her pillows, "that I have your Paisley shawl."

"It was raining that night," she said in her soft, delicate voice. "I have had it dried and pressed. It is not hurt. I

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 if I spoke or was silent, it was to

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.

"Get the shawl, Fanny, dear," said Miss Emily, "and wrap it up for Miss Blakiston."

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

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 goodby I can not

find words for it, but it was perhaps a finality, an effect of a closed door that I felt without being able to

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.

But to help I should know the facts. Only, were there any facts to know? Suppose just by way of argument,

for I did not believe it 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

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 hail,

where Maggie, finding it at nine o'clock that evening, set up such a series of shrieks and exclamations as

I knitted that evening. It has been my custom for years to knit bedroomslippers 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

I began with a major premise to regard the confession as a real one, until it was proved otherwise. Granted,

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

I called up the local physician, a Doctor Lingard, that night and asked him about Miss Emily's condition. He

"It's just a breaking up," he said. "It has come early, because she has had a trying life, and more responsibility

"I have been wondering if a change of scene would not be a good thing," I suggested. But he was almost

"Change!" he said. "I've been after her to get away for years. She won't leave. I don't believe she has been

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

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.

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 terrorstricken, 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

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.

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 icewater 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 lemonjuice on at night you'd tighten up

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,

subconsciously, I was making for the cellar all the time. I only know that I landed there, with a lemon in my

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

I would, quite certainly, have gone away as I came, clueless, had I not attempted to straighten a pile of books,

dangerously sagging like my chin! 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, kneedeep in a raging

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

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 notebook, a pair of

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.

Armed with the volume, and the lemon forgotten where the cook found it the next day and made much of

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

The notebook 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 19021903 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 twentyfive thousand dollars. There was

nothing to show whether it was money saved or money spent, money paid out or come in.

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.

I did not sleep that night. More and more, as I lay wideeyed 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.

Once, toward morning, I dozed off, to waken in a state of terror that I recognized as a return of the old fear.

That day I made two resolves to send for Willie and to make a determined effort to see the night

telephoneoperator. My letter to Willie off, I tried to fill the day until the hour when the night

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

"I'm at my Christmas presents now," she said, "and I've fixed on a bedroom set for Miss Emily. I suppose you

"That's where Carlo died," she said. "It's never been used since, unless you " 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

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.

"Whose photograph is that?" she asked suddenly. "I don't know that I ever saw it before. But it looks familiar,

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 dressertop, her mind set on

"It's queer," she said. "I've been in this room about a thousand times, and I've never noticed it before. I

As she went out, she turned to me, and I gathered that not only the measurement for a gift had brought her

"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."

"Of course I shall," I assured her. "But didn't the hackman see you packing the books?"

"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

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

The total result of my conversation that afternoon on the front porch of the small frame house on a side street

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

"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

"But just think a moment," I went on. "Suppose some one is planning to rob the house, and using this

"I don't remember anything about the calls you are talking about," she parried, without looking at me. "As

"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?"

"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

"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

"But 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

"Why don't you go back to the city?" she said suddenly. "Go away and forget all about us here. That would

To my absolute amazement she began to cry. We had been sitting on a cheap porch seat, side by side, and she

"She's going to die!" she said shakily. "She's weaker every day. She is slipping away, and no one does

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

"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."

She had a sort of gift for silence. As I grew later on to know Anne Bullard better, I realized that even more.

"What I want," I said, "is to have Miss Emily know that I am friendly that I am willing to do anything to

"You see," she said, with a kind of dogged patience, "it isn't really up to you, or to me either. It's something

When I went away I was aware that her eyes followed me, anxious and thoughtful eyes, with something of

Willie came late the next evening. I had indeed gone upstairs 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.

"As I thought!" he said. "Nerves gone, looks gone. I told you Maggie would put a curse on you. What is it?"

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 I think the word is "hornswoggled."

When I brought out "The Handwriting of God," following Mrs. Graves's story of the books, he looked

"Sprague is a lunatic," he said, with conviction. "There was a body, and it went into the river in the

packingcase. It is distinctly possible that this Knight or Wright 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

And, after all, that was the only immediate result of Willie's visit 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

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

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 pistolshot, and I ran to the head of the stairs.

There was no light below, but a current of cool night air came up the staircase. And suddenly I realized that

"Willie!" I cried out, in an agony of fright. But he did not reply. And then, suddenly, the telephone rang.

I did not answer it. I know now why it rang, that there was real anxiety behind its summons. But I hardly

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 newelpost, before

he knew I was on the staircase. He wheeled sharply, and I felt, to my surprise, that he held a revolver in his

We listened, standing together. There were undoubtedly sounds outside, some one moving about, a hand on a

windowcatch, and finally not particularly cautious steps at the front door. It swung open. I could hear it

I put a hand out to steady myself by the comfort of Willie's presence before me, between me and that

softlyopening door. But Willie was moving forward, crouched down, I fancied, and the memory of that

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 hallstand 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

When I opened them, Willie was standing unhurt, staring over the burning match at the door, which was

"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."

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

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

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.

"There is nothing wrong," I replied. I do not know why I said it. Sprely there was enough wrong, with Willie

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.

"Oh, please," said this voice, "go out and look in your garden, or along the road. Please quickly!"

"You will have to explain," I said impatiently. "Of course we will go and look, but who is it, and why "

I was cut off there, definitely, and I could not get "central's" attention again.

Willie's voice from the veranda boomed through the lower floor. "This is I," he called, "No boiling water,

He went into the library and lighted a lamp. He was smiling when I entered, a reassuring smile, but rather a

"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 why didn't you scream?"

The library was in chaos. Letters were lying about, papers, books. The drawer of the large desktable 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 hidingplace, but a glance

into it revealed only a bottle of red ink and the manuscript of a sermon on missions.

Standing in the disorder of the room, I told Willie about the telephonemessage. He listened attentively, and

"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.

"I'll verify it," he explained. "If some one is really anxious, I'll get the car and take a scout around."

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.

Willie looked thoughtful when he returned to the library. "There's a queer story back of all this," he said. "I

"He doesn't want to shoot me, or he could have done it," was his answer. "I'll just take a look around, and

It was halfpast 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

The dawn is early in August, and although it was not more than halfpast 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

"Absolutely nothing," he said. "It was a ruse to get me out of the house, of course. I've run the whole way

"No," he said. "I met the doctor what's his name? the local M.D. anyhow 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

I had prepared the coffee machine and carried the tray to the library. While I lighted the lamp, he stood,

"Look here, Aunt Agnes, I think I'm a good bit of a fool, but some time this morning I wish you would call

But when I stared at him, he only laughed sheepishly. "You can see how your suspicious disposition has

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 motorcoat. It was then that the flashlight fell out. I picked

"Good heavens!" he said, raising himself on his elbow. "It belongs to the doctor. He gave it to me to examine

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

what then? Why had he done it? What of the telephonecall, 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?

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

When I told Willie, he was evidently relieved. "I'm glad of it," he said heartily. "The doctor's a fine old chap,

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

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.

Willie put the matter flatly to me as he stood in the hall, drawing on his driving gloves.

"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.

"Let her friends help her. She has plenty of them. Besides, isn't it rather a queer way to help her, to try to

I could not explain what I felt so strongly 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 it is always difficult to

put what I felt about Miss Emily into words that she both hoped for and dreaded desperately the light of the

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 but without exultation, for in the end it cost too much that I point to the solution of one issue

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

"Fiddlesticks!" I said sharply. "You slept all night. I was up and around the house, and you never knew it."

"Honest to heaven, Miss Agnes, I never slep' at all. I heard a horse galloping', like it was runnin' off, and it

And after a time I felt that, however mistaken Maggie had been about her night's sleep, she was possibly

"He started to run about the stable somewhere," she said. "You can smile if you want. That's the heaven's

"We can go and look for hoofmarks," I said, and rose. But Maggie only shook her head.

"It was no real horse, Miss Agnes," she said. "You'll find nothing. Anyhow, I've been and looked. There's not

But Maggie was wrong. I found hoofprints in plenty in the turf beside the drive, and a track of them through

the lettucebed 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

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,

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

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.

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

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

My theories were rudely disturbed shortly after that by a visit from Martin Sprague. I fancied that Willie had

"I'd like another look at that slip of paper," he said. "Where do you keep it, by the way?"

"In a safe place," I replied noncommittally, 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 hidingplace, 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

I did, while he listened attentively. Afterward we walked back to the barn, and I showed him the piece of

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 harnessmaker. He has probably repaired that strap, or sold a

"I am not doing detective work," I said shortly. "I am trying to help some one who is dying of anxiety and

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

"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

"I think you'd better give up the place and go back to town," he said. But I saw that he watched me carefully,

"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.

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,

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

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.

"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.

"My dear," said Miss Emily, in her highbred voice, "if you have anything to do, Miss Blakiston will sit with

"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.

Miss Emily sighed, and I saw her eyes seek the Bible beside her. But she only said gently: "Then sit down,

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 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

"There are plenty of lettuces," I said, "although a few were trampled by a runaway horse the other night. It is

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

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,

"I think I should not have told you," I apologized. "I thought it might interest you. Of course nothing

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

Anne Bullard was watching from the doorway, and it seemed to me, having got so far, I could not retreat. I

"Miss Bullard," I said. "I would like to have just a short conversation with Miss Emily. It is about a private

The girl was dogged enough by that time. Both dogged and frightened, I felt. But she stood her ground.

"She is not to be worried about anything," she insisted. "And she's not supposed to have visitors. That's the

I felt outraged and indignant, but against the stone wall of the girl's presence and her distrust I was helpless. I

"The woman's a fool," said Anne Bullard, with a sort of suppressed fierceness. She stood aside as, having

said goodby to Miss Emily, I went out, and I felt that she hardly breathed until I had got safely to the street.

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.

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.

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.

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

And I believe this was the truth. They would surely have been glad to get rid of me, these friends of Miss

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 middleaged 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.

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

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,

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.

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

She could not talk. The thing she had come to say was totally beyond her. I put her to bed in her own room.

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 sick room. 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

"If only you had never taken this house!" she said. "You people with money, you think there is nothing you

"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."

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

"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

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.

I may have fancied it I am always fancying things about Miss Emily 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

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

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 as

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

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.

"Not a cent to keep up the mausoleum or anything," Mrs. Graves confided to me. "And nothing to the church.

All to that telephonegirl, who comes from no one knows where! It's enough to make her father turn over in

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

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 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

"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 it ain't

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

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

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 notebook 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,

A day or two before I went back to the city, Maggie came to me with a folded handkerchief in her hand.

"S'got a name on it," Maggie volunteered. "Wright, I think it is. 'Tain't hers, unless she's picked it up

Maggie's eyes were snapping with suspicion. "There ain't any Wrights around here, Miss Agnes," she said. "I

In tracing the mystery of the confession, I find that three apparently disconnected discoveries paved the way

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 wallcloset 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

Yet, on Anne Bullard being shown the one Maggie had found, she disclaimed it. "Don't you think some one

But I thought, as I turned away, that she took a step toward me. When I stopped, however, and faced about,

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.

I intended to finish the history of Bolivar County before I left. I dislike not finishing a book. Besides, this one

fascinated me 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 and I wondered if she had

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

That night, at dinner, I said, "Anne, are there any Bullards in this neighborhood now?"

But she received my statement in silence. She had, as I have said, rather a gift for silence.

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,

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

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

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

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

In a curious fashion, each of us wished, I think, to prove the quality of her tenderness for the little old lady

"Why not let things be as they are, Anne?" I asked. "It can do no good. Whatever it is, and I do not know,

"Some one may find it," she replied. "Some one who does not care, as I as we care."

"It is a letter. I shall burn it without reading. Although," she drew a long breath, "I know what it contains."

"If in any way it comes into my hands," I assured her, "I shall let you know. And I shall not read it."

"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" she hesitated

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 dressinggown, and as I left the room, I confronted Maggie in the hallway. She

She held it out, and I took it. On the outside, in Miss Emily's writing, it said, "To whom it may concern." It

"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."

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.

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

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 that sort of

spiritual bookkeeping which most of us call religion. Anne Sprague 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

I read the letter that night in the library where the light was good. It was a narrative, not a letter, strictly

"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 greatgrandmother 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

(There was a space here. When the writing began again, time had elapsed. The ink was different, the writing

"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

"'From hatred, envy, and malice, and all uncharitableness, Good Lord, deliver us.'

"Must one suffer twice for the same thing? Is it not true that we pay but one penalty? Surely we pay either

"Will this ever be found? Where shall I hide it? For I have the feeling that I must hide it, not destroy it as

the Catholic buries his sin with the priest. My father once said that it is the healthful humiliation of the

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 for the

I heard the story that night gently told, and somehow I feel that that is the version by which Miss Emily will

"If humiliation be a virtue " I read and was about to turn the page, when I heard Anne in the hall. She was

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,

"First of all, Miss Blakiston," said the doctor, "one must have known the family to realize the situation its

pride in its own uprightness. The virtue of the name, what it stood for in Bolivar County. She was raised on

"But there is another side, also. I doubt if any girl was ever raised as Miss Emily was. She well, she knew

nothing. At fifty she was as childlike and innocent as she was at ten. She had practically never heard of vice.

"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

"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. Twentyfive 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

"Very well. This girl the one Carlo ran away with 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 well, it sickened her. She had not known about those

"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.

"Remember, I never knew. I, who would have done anything for her 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.

"Then, the night after Carlo had been buried, she telephoned for me. It was eleven o'clock, She met me, out

"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

breakingpoint. I believe what she said that she had no intention even of striking her. You can't take the act

itself. You have to take twentyfive 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

"There we were," he said, with a long breath. "Poor Emily, and the other poor soul, neither of them

"I know about the books," I put in hastily. I could not have him going over that again.

"Poor Emily," he said. "She tried to atone. She brought Anne here, and told her the whole story. It was a bad

time 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

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 telephonebox, 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 all of these

and her occasional weakenings, poor soul, when she tried to change her handwriting against discovery, and

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

Martin Sprague came the next day. I was in the library alone, and he was with Anne in the garden, when

"I wish you'd look at this," she said. "If it's cooked too much, it gets tough and " She straightened suddenly

"I'd thank you to look out and see the goingson in our garden," she said sharply. "In broad daylight, too. I

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

And then and again, as with fear, it is hard to put into words 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