been the realest thing
in their lives. It had dominated them, obsessed them. When the Reverend
Samuel Thaddeus died, they had built him, not a monument, but a parish
house. When Carlo Benton died (however did such an ungodly name come to
belong to a Benton?) Miss Emily according to the story, had done without
fresh mourning and built him a window.

I looked at the window. It was extremely ugly, and very devout. And
under it was the dead man's name and two dates, 1860 and 1911.

So Carlo Benton had died the year Miss Emily claimed to have done a
murder! Another proof, I reflected that Martin Sprague would say. He had
been on her hands for a long time, both well and ill. Small wonder if
little Miss Emily had fallen to imagining things, or to confessing them.

I looked at the memorial window once more, and I could almost visualize
her gathering up the dead man's hateful books, and getting them
as quickly as possible out of the house. Quite possibly there were
unmentionable volumes among them--de Maupassant, perhaps Boccaccio. I
had a distinct picture, too, of Mrs. Graves, lips primly set, assisting
her with hands that fairly itched with the righteousness of her actions.

I still held the roses, and as I left the church I decided to lay them
on some grave in the churchyard. I thought it quite likely that roses
from the same arch had been frequently used for that purpose. Some very
young grave, I said to myself, and found one soon enough, a bit of a
rectangle of fresh earth, and a jarful of pansies on it. It lay in the
shadow of the Benton mausoleum.

That was how I found that Carlo Benton had died on the 27th of May,
1911.

I cannot claim that the fact at the time had any significance for me,
or that I saw in it anything more than another verification of Martin
Sprague's solution. But it enabled me to reconstruct the Benton
household at the date that had grown so significant. The 30th would have
probably been the day after the funeral. Perhaps the nurse was still
there. He had had a nurse for months, according to Mrs. Graves. And
there would have been the airing that follows long illness and death,
the opened windows, the packing up or giving away of clothing, the
pauses and silences, the sense of strangeness and quiet, the lowered
voices. And there would have been, too, that remorseless packing for
destruction of the dead atheist's books.

And some time, during that day or the night that followed, little Miss
Emil