How much of what I say of Miss Emily depends on my later knowledge, I wonder?  Did I notice then that she was watching me furtively, or is it only on looking back that I recall it?  I do recall it—­the hall door open and a vista of smiling garden beyond, and silhouetted against the sunshine, Miss Emily’s frail figure and searching, slightly uplifted face.  There was something in her eyes that I had not seen before—­a sort of exaltation.  She was not, that morning, the Miss Emily who ran a finger along her baseboards to see if we dusted them.

She had walked out, and it had exhausted her.  She breathed in little gasps.

“I think,” she said at last, “that I must telephone for Mr. Staley, I am never very strong in hot weather.”

“Please let me call him, for you, Miss Emily.”  I am not a young woman, and she was at least sixty-five.  But, because she was so small and frail, I felt almost a motherly anxiety for her that morning.

“I think I should like to do it, if you don’t mind.  We are old friends.  He always comes promptly when I call him.”

She went back alone, and I waited in the doorway.  When she came out, she was smiling, and there was more color in her face.

“He is coming at once.  He is always very thoughtful for me.”

Now, without any warning, something that had been seething since her breathless arrival took shape in my mind, and became—­suspicion.  What if it had been Miss Emily who had called me the second time to the telephone, and having established the connection, had waited, breathing hard for—­what?

It was fantastic, incredible in the light of that brilliant summer day.  I looked at her, dainty and exquisite as ever, her ruchings fresh and white, her very face indicative of decorum and order, her wistful old mouth still rather like a child’s, her eyes, always slightly upturned because of her diminutive height, so that she had habitually a look of adoration.

“One of earth’s saints,” the rector had said to me on Sunday morning.  “A good woman, Miss Blakiston, and a sacrifice to an unworthy family.”

Suspicion is like the rain.  It falls on the just and on the unjust.  And that morning I began to suspect Miss Emily.  I had no idea of what.

On my mentioning an errand in the village she promptly offered to take me with her in the Staley hack.  She had completely altered in manner.  The strain was gone.  In her soft low voice, as we made our way to the road, she told me the stories of some of the garden flowers.

“The climbing rose over the arch, my dear,” she said, “my mother brought from England on her wedding journey.  People have taken cuttings from it again and again, but the cuttings never thrive.  A bad winter, and they are gone.  But this one has lived.  Of course now and then it freezes down.”

She chattered on, and my suspicions grew more and more shadowy.  They would have gone, I think, had not Maggie called me back with a grocery list.