is voice trailed off.

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

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

"You knew that, too!" He gazed at me.

"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 shall not lift a hand to save myself.'"

So it went through the hours. Her fear, which I still think was the
terror that communicated itself to me; the various clues, which she,
poor victim, had overlooked; the articles laid carelessly in the
book she had been reading and accidentally hidden with her brother's
forbidden literature; the books themselves, with all of five years to
destroy them, and left untouched; her own anxiety about the confession
in the telephone-box, which led to our finding it; her espionage of the
house by means of the telephone; the doctor's night visit in search of
the confession; the daily penance for five years of the dead woman's
photograph in her room--all of these--and her occasional weakenings,
poor soul, when she tried to change her handwriting against discovery,
and refused to allow the second telephone to be installed.

How clear it was! How, in a way, inevitable! And, too, how really
best for her it had turned out. For she had made a pact, and she died
believing that discovery here had come, and would take the place of
punishment beyond.

Martin Sprague came the next day. I was in the library alone, and he was
with Anne in the garden, when Maggie came into the room with a saucer of
crab-apple jelly.

"I wish you'd look at this," she said. "If it's cooked too much, it gets
tough and--" She straightened suddenly and stood staring out through a
window.

"I'd thank you to look out and see the goings-on 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 was kissing her, gently and
very tenderly.

And then--and again, as with fear, it is h