"It would be better for
her, you understand," the doctor said, over the telephone. "But she is
very determined, and she insists on remaining where she is."

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

I have wondered since what they thought of me, Anne Bullard and the
doctor, to have feared me as they did. I look in the mirror, and I see
a middle-aged woman, with a determined nose, slightly inquisitive, and
what I trust is a humorous mouth, for it has no other virtues. But they
feared me. Perhaps long looking for a danger affects the mental vision.
Anyhow, by the doctor's order, I was not allowed to call and see Miss
Emily again.

Then, one night, the heat suddenly lifted. One moment I was sitting on
the veranda, lifeless and inert, and the next a cool wind, with a hint
of rain, had set the shutters to banging and the curtains to flowing,
like flags of truce, from the windows. The air was life, energy. I felt
revivified.

And something of the same sort must have happened to Miss Emily. She
must have sat up among her pillows, her face fanned with the electric
breeze, and made her determination to see me. Anne Bullard was at work,
and she was free from observation.

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 into the library.

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

I had made no protest when Anne Bullard presented herself at the door
the morning after Miss Emily arrived, and, walking into the house, took
sleepless charge of the sickroom. And I made no reference save once to
the reason for the tragedy. That was the night Miss Emily died. Anne
Bullard had called to me that she feared there was a change, and I went
into the sickroom. There was a change, and I could only shake my head.
She burst out at me then.

"If only you had never taken this house!" she said. "You people with
money, you think there is nothing you can not have. You came, and now
look!"

"Anne," I said with