“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 that, beyond his religious views or lack of them, she knew nothing.  But on the matter of the books she was firm.

“After the box was ready,” she said, “we went to every room and searched it.  Miss Emily was set on clearing out every trace.  At the last minute I found one called ‘The Fallacy of Christianity’ slipped down behind the dresser in his room, and we put that in.”

It was “The Fallacy of Christianity” that Maggie had brought me that morning.

“It is a most interesting story,” I observed.  “What delicious tea, Mrs. Graves!  And then you fastened up the box and saw it thrown into the river.  It was quite a ceremony.”