But I got nothing more from her.  She had understood me, it was clear, and when at last she stopped crying, she knew well enough that she had betrayed her understanding.  But she would not talk.  I felt that she was not unfriendly, and that she was uncertain rather than stubborn.  In the end I got up, little better off than when I came.

“I’ll give you time to think it over,” I said.  “Not so much about the telephone calls, because you’ve really answered that.  But about Miss Emily.  She needs help, and I want to help her.  But you tie my hands.”

She had a sort of gift for silence.  As I grew later on to know Anne Bullard better, I realized that even more.  So now she sat silent, and let me talk.

“What I want,” I said, “is to have Miss Emily know that I am friendly—­that I am willing to do anything to—­to show my friendliness.  Anything.”

“You see,” she said, with a kind of dogged patience, “it isn’t really up to you, or to me either.  It’s something else.”  She hesitated.  “She’s very obstinate,” she added.

When I went away I was aware that her eyes followed me, anxious and thoughtful eyes, with something of Miss Emily’s own wide-eyed gaze.

Willie came late the next evening.  I had indeed gone up-stairs to retire when I heard his car in the drive.  When I admitted him, he drew me into the library and gave me a good looking over.

“As I thought!” he said.  “Nerves gone, looks gone.  I told you Maggie would put a curse on you.  What is it?”

So I told him.  The telephone he already knew about.  The confession he read over twice, and then observed, characteristically, that he would be eternally—­I think the word is “hornswoggled.”

When I brought out “The Handwriting of God,” following Mrs. Graves’s story of the books, he looked thoughtful.  And indeed by the end of the recital he was very grave.

“Sprague is a lunatic,” he said, with conviction.  “There was a body, and it went into the river in the packing-case.  It is distinctly possible that this Knight—­or Wright—­woman, who owned the handkerchief, was the victim.  However, that’s for later on.  The plain truth is, that there was a murder, and that Miss Emily is shielding some one else.”

And, after all, that was the only immediate result of Willie’s visit —­a new theory!  So that now it stood:  there was a crime.  There was no crime.  Miss Emily had committed it.  Miss Emily had not committed it.  Miss Emily had confessed it, but some one else had committed it.

For a few hours, however, our attention was distracted from Miss Emily and her concerns by the attempted robbery of the house that night.  I knew nothing of it until I heard Willie shouting downstairs.  I was deeply asleep, relaxed no doubt by the consciousness that at last there was a man in the house.  And, indeed, Maggie slept for the same reason through the entire occurrence.