trating eye
and an inquiring nature. I finally decided to take the bull by the horns
and hang it in its accustomed place in the hall, where Maggie, finding
it at nine o'clock that evening, set up such a series of shrieks and
exclamations as surpassed even her own record.

I knitted that evening. It has been my custom for years to knit
bedroom-slippers for an old ladies' home in which I am interested.
Because I can work at them with my eyes shut, through long practise,
I find the work soothing. So that evening I knitted at Eliza
Klinordlinger's fifth annual right slipper, and tried to develop a
course of action.

I began with a major premise--to regard the confession as a real one,
until it was proved otherwise. Granted, then, that my little old Miss
Emily had killed a woman.

1st--Who was the woman?

2nd--Where is the body?

3rd--What was the reason for the crime?

Question two I had a tentative answer for. However horrible and
incredible it seemed, it was at least possible that Miss Emily had
substituted the body for the books, and that what Mrs. Graves described
as a rite had indeed been one. But that brought up a picture I could not
face. And yet--

I called up the local physician, a Doctor Lingard, that night and asked
him about Miss Emily's condition. He was quite frank with me.

"It's just a breaking up," he said. "It has come early, because she has
had a trying life, and more responsibility than she should have had."

"I have been wondering if a change of scene would not be a good thing,"
I suggested. But he was almost scornful.

"Change!" he said. "I've been after her to get away for years. She won't
leave. I don't believe she has been twelve miles away in thirty years."

"I suppose her brother was a great care," I observed.

It seemed to me that the doctor's hearty voice was a trifle less frank
when he replied. But when I rang off I told myself that I, too, was
becoming neurasthenic and suspicious. I had, however, learned what I had
wanted to know. Miss Emily had had no life outside Bolivar County. The
place to look for her story was here, in the immediate vicinity.

That night I made a second visit to the basement. It seemed to me, with
those chaotic shelves before me, that something of the haste and terror
of a night five years before came back to me, a night when, confronted
by the necessity for concealing a crime, the box upstairs had been
hurriedly unpacked, its contents hidden here and loc