g morning I spent in bed.
At noon Maggie came upstairs, holding at arm's length a book. She kept
her face averted, and gave me a slanting and outraged glance.

"This is a nice place we've come to," she said, acidly. "Murder in the
telephone and anti-Christ in the fruit cellar!"

"Why, Maggie," I expostulated.

"If these books stay, I go, and that's flat, Miss Agnes," was her ipse
dixit. She dropped the book on the bed and stalked out, pausing at the
door only to throw back, "If this is a clergyman's house, I guess I'd be
better out of the church."

I took up the book. It was well-worn, and in the front, in a heavy
masculine hand, the owner had written his name--written it large, a bit
defiantly, perhaps. It had taken both courage and conviction to bring
such a book into that devout household.

I am not quick, mentally, especially when it comes to logical thought. I
daresay I am intuitive rather than logical. It was not by any process
of reasoning at all, I fancy, that it suddenly seemed strange that there
should be books locked away in the cellar. Yet it was strange. For that
had been a bookish household. Books were its stock in trade, one may
say. Such as I had borrowed from the library had been carefully
tended. Torn leaves were neatly repaired. The reference books were
alphabetically arranged. And, looking back on my visit to the cellar, I
recalled now as inconsistent the disorder of those basement shelves.

I did not reach the truth until, that afternoon, I made a second visit
to the cellar. Mrs. Graves had been mistaken. If not all Carlo Benton's
proscribed books were hidden there, at least a large portion of his
library was piled, in something like confusion, on the shelves. Yet she
maintained that they had searched the house, and she herself had been
present when the books were packed and taken away to the river.

That afternoon I returned Mrs. Graves's visit. She was at home, and in a
sort of flurried neatness that convinced me she had seen me from far up
the road. That conviction was increased by the amazing promptness with
which a tea-tray followed my entrance. I had given her tea the day she
came to see me, and she was not to be outdone. Indeed, I somehow gained
the impression that tray and teapot, and even little cakes, had been
waiting, day by day, for my anticipated visit.

It was not hard to set her talking of Carlo Benton and his wickedness.
She rose to the bait like a hungry fish. Yet I gathered