y claimed to have committed her crime.

I went home thoughtfully. At the gate I turned and looked back. The
Benton Mausoleum was warm in the sunset, and the rose sprays lay, like
outstretched arms, across the tiny grave.

Maggie is amazingly efficient. I am efficient myself, I trust, but
I modify it with intelligence. It is not to me a vital matter, for
instance, if three dozen glasses of jelly sit on a kitchen table a day
or two after they are prepared for retirement to the fruit cellar.
I rather like to see them, marshaled in their neat rows, capped with
sealing wax and paper, and armed with labels. But Maggie has neither
sentiment nor imagination. Jelly to her is an institution, not an
inspiration. It is subject to certain rules and rites, of which not the
least is the formal interment in the fruit closet.

Therefore, after much protesting that night, I agreed to visit the fruit
cellar, and select a spot for the temporary entombing of thirty-six
jelly tumblers, which would have been thirty-seven had Delia known the
efficacy of a silver spoon. I can recall vividly the mental shift from
the confession to that domestic excursion, my own impatience, Maggie's
grim determination, and the curious denouement of that visit.

III

I had the very slightest acquaintance with the basement of the Benton
house. I knew it was dry and orderly, and with that my interest in it
ceased. It was not cemented, but its hard clay floor was almost as solid
as macadam. In one end was built a high potato-bin. In another corner
two or three old pews from the church, evidently long discarded and
showing weather-stains, as though they had once served as garden
benches, were up-ended against the whitewashed wall. The fruit-closet,
built in of lumber, occupied one entire end, and was virtually a room,
with a door and no windows.

Maggie had, she said, found it locked and had had an itinerant locksmith
fit a key to it.

"It's all scrubbed and ready," she said. "I found that preserved
melon-rind you had for lunch in a corner. 'Twouldn't of kept much
longer, so I took it up and opened it. She's probably got all sorts of
stuff spoiling in the locked part. Some folks're like that."

Most of the shelves were open, but now, holding the lamp high, I saw
that a closet with a door occupied one end. The door was padlocked. At
the time I was interested, but I was, as I remember, much more occupied
with Maggie's sense of meum and tuum, which I co