“I’ve a sort of second sight, Miss Agnes,” she added.  And, with a shrewdness I found later was partially correct:  “She was snooping around to see if you’d found that paper, and it came on to rain; so she took the shawl.  I should say,” said Maggie, lowering her voice, “that as like as not she’s been in this house every night since we came.”

Late that afternoon I cut some of the roses from the arch for Miss Emily, and wrapping them against the sun, carried them to the village.  At the last I hesitated.  It was so much like prying.  I turned aside at the church intending to leave them there for the altar.  But I could find no one in the parish house, and no vessel to hold them.

It was late afternoon.  I opened a door and stepped into the old church.  I knelt for a moment, and then sat back and surveyed the quiet building.  It occurred to me that here one could obtain a real conception of the Benton family, and of Miss Emily.  The church had 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.