ional sort.

Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily's clear, slightly
upturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of such
journalistic reports. But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth a
precisely opposite view.

"You will probably find," he wrote, "that the little lady is pretty well
fed up on such stuff. The calmer and more placid the daily life, the
more apt is the secret inner one, in such a circumscribed existence, to
be a thriller! You might look over the books in the house. There is a
historic case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brother
to a den of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brother
was subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox's Book of
Martyrs. Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library."

I put down his letter and glanced around the room. Was he right, after
all? Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in this
strange manner? And if it was true, was it not in its own way as
mysterious as everything else?

I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague's
conviction. It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily
Benton had committed a crime. And, as if to lend color to his assertion,
the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and
illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume. It was
Fox's Book of Martyrs!

If I may analyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselves
into three parts. The first was fear. That seems to have given away to
curiosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety. Of the
three, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself at
the time--that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing she
claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.

With regard to Martin Sprague's theory, I was divided. I wanted him
to be right. I wanted him to be wrong. No picture I could visualize of
little old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn. On the
other hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession as
an actual one.

The scrap of paper became, for the time, my universe. Did I close my
eyes, I saw it side by side with the inscription in "Fifty years of my
Bolivar County," and letter for letter, in the same hand. Did the sun
shine, I had it in the light, examining it, reading it. To such a point
did it obsess me that I refused to all