“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 locked away, and some other content, inert and heavy, had taken the place of the books.

Miss Emily in her high bed, her Bible and spectacles on the stand beside her, her starched pillows, her soft and highbred voice?  Or another Miss Emily, panting and terror-stricken, carrying down her armfuls of forbidden books, her slight figure bent under their weight, her ears open for sounds from the silent house?  Or that third Miss Emily, Martin Sprague’s, a strange wild creature, neither sane nor insane, building a crime out of the fabric of a nightmare?  Which was the real Emily Benton?

Or was there another contingency that I had not thought of?  Had some secret enemy of Miss Emily’s, some hysterical girl from the parish, suffering under a fancied slight, or some dismissed and revengeful servant, taken this strange method of retaliation, done it and then warned the little old lady that her house contained such a paper?  I confess that this last thought took hold on me.  It offered a way out that I clutched at.

I had an almost frantic feeling by that time that I must know the truth.  Suspense was weighing on me.  And Maggie, never slow to voice an unpleasant truth, said that night, as she brought the carafe of ice-water to the library, “You’re going off the last few days, Miss Agnes.”  And when I made no reply:  “You’re sagging around the chin.  There’s nothing shows age like the chin.  If you’d rub a little lemon-juice on at night you’d tighten up some.”

I ignored her elaborately, but I knew she was right.  Heat and sleepless nights and those early days of fear had told on me.  And although I usually disregard Maggie’s cosmetic suggestions, culled from the beauty columns of the evening paper, a look in the mirror decided me.  I went downstairs for the lemon.  At least, I thought it was for the lemon.  I am not sure.  I have come to be uncertain of my motives.  It is distinctly possible that, sub-consciously, I was making for the cellar all the time.  I only know that I landed there, with a lemon in my hand, at something after eleven o’clock.

The books were piled in disorder on the shelves.  Their five years of burial had not hurt them beyond a slight dampness of the leaves.  No hand, I believe, had touched them since they were taken from the box where Mrs. Graves had helped to pack them.  Then, if I were shrewd, I should perhaps gather something from their very disorder, But, as a matter of fact, I did not.