relics of
the historian of Bolivar County. And I had a corroboration of that
impression from my visitor of that afternoon, a Mrs. Graves.

"I've been slow in coming, Miss Blakiston," she said, seating herself
primly. "I don't suppose you can understand, but this has always been
the Benton place, and it seems strange to us to see new faces here."

I replied, with some asperity, that I had not been anxious to take the
house, but that Miss Emily had been so insistent that I had finally done
so.

It seemed to me that she flashed a quick glance at me.

"She is quite the most loved person in the valley," she said. "And she
loves the place. It is--I cannot imagine why she rented the house. She
is far from comfortable where she is."

After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as the
cause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.

"It cannot be money," I said. "The rent is absurdly low. The agent
wished her to ask more, but she refused."

She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk
gloves. And when she spoke again it was of the garden. But before she
left she returned to Miss Emily.

"She has had a hard life, in a way," she said. "It is only five years
since she buried her brother, and her father not long before that. She
has broken a great deal since then. Not that the brother--"

"I understand he was a great care."

Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the
ecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.

"It was not only that," she said. "When he was--all right, he was an
atheist. Imagine, in this house! He had the most terrible books, Miss
Blakiston. And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he
is apt to lead a wicked life. There is nothing to hold him back."

Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems. She moved abstractedly
toward the door.

"In this very hall," she said, "I helped Miss Emily to pack all his
books into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley--the hackman at the
station, you know--and he dumped the whole thing into the river. We went
away with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!"

Martin Sprague's newspapers arrived the next morning. They bore a date
of two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rather
triumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of a
young woman by some unknown assassin. It had been a grisly crime, and
the paper was filled with details of a most sensat