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 can travel untold
distances, fear can? Of course."

"But, Martin!" I exclaimed. "Little Miss Emily a murderess."

He threw up his hands.

"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 listened attentively.

"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."

"She has had enough trouble to develop her."

"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 paper in his hand--"this is
one."

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 her nervous system to going in the wrong direction."

Late that afternoon, as it happened, I was enabled to learn something
of this from a visiting neighbor, and once again I was forced to
acknowledge that he might be right.

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