tual 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 voiced it when he came down
to his breakfast there.

"How did you sleep?" I asked.

"Not very well." He picked up his coffee-cup, and smiled over it rather
sheepishly. "To tell the truth, I got to thinking about things--the
furniture and all that," he said vaguely. "How many people have sat in
the chairs and seen themselves in the mirror and died in the bed, and so
on."

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

"There have been twenty-three deaths in it in the last forty years, Mr.
Willie," she volunteered. "That's according to the gardener. And more
than half died in that room of yours."

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

"Very well," she said, with a meekness behind which she was both
indignant and frightened. "But there is one word I might mention before
I go, and that is--cats!"

"Cats!" said Willie, as she slammed the door.

"I think it is only one cat," I observed mildly. "It belongs to
Miss Emily, I fancy. It manages to be in a lot of places nearly
simultaneously, and Maggie swears it is a dozen."

Willie is not subtle. He is a practical young man with a growing family,
and a tendency the last year or two to flesh. But he ate his breakfast
thoughtfully.

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

"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