ard, 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 of the confession.

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 book-keeping 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 hand of Providence.

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

"I must set down this thing as it happened. I shall write it fully,
because I must get it off my mind. I find that I am always composing
it, and that my lips move when I walk along the street or even when I am
sitting in church. How terrible if I should some day speak it aloud. My
great-grandmother was a Catholic. She was a Bullard. Perhaps it is from
her that I have this overwhelming impulse to confession. And lately I
have been terrified. I must tell it, or I shall shriek it out some day,
in the church, during the Litany. 'From battle and murder, and from
sudden death, Good Lord, deliver us.'"

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

"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,