“A sack of flour,” she said, “and some green vegetables, and—­Miss Agnes, that woman was down on her knees beside the telephone!—­and bluing for the laundry, and I guess that’s all.”

The telephone!  It was always the telephone.  We drove on down the lane, eyed somnolently by spotted cows and incurious sheep, and all the way Miss Emily talked.  She was almost garrulous.  She asked the hackman about his family and stopped the vehicle to pick up a peddler, overburdened with his pack.  I watched her with amazement.  Evidently this was Mr. Staley’s Miss Emily.  But it was not mine.

But I saw mine, too, that morning.  It was when I asked the hackman to put me down at the little telephone building.  I thought she put her hand to her throat, although the next moment she was only adjusting the ruching at her neck.

“You—­you have decided to have the second telephone put in, then?”

I hesitated.  She so obviously did not want it installed.  And was I to submit meekly to the fear again, without another effort to vanquish it?

“I think not, dear Miss Emily,” I said at last, smiling at her drawn face.  “Why should I disturb your lovely old house and its established order?”

“But I want you to do just what you think best,” she protested.  She had put her hands together.  It was almost a supplication.

As to the strange night calls, there was little to be learned.  The night operator was in bed.  The manager made a note of my complaint, and promised an investigation, which, having had experience with telephone investigations, I felt would lead nowhere.  I left the building, with my grocery list in my hand.

The hack was gone, of course.  But—­I may have imagined it—­I thought I saw Miss Emily peering at me from behind the bonnets and hats in the milliner’s window.

I did not investigate.  The thing was enough on my nerves as it was.

Maggie served me my luncheon in a sort of strained silence.  She observed once, as she brought me my tea, that she was giving me notice and intended leaving on the afternoon train.  She had, she stated, holding out the sugar-bowl to me at arm’s length, stood a great deal in the way of irregular hours from me, seeing as I would read myself to sleep, and let the light burn all night, although very fussy about the gas-bills.  But she had reached the end of her tether, and you could grate a lemon on her most anywhere, she was that covered with goose-flesh.

“Goose-flesh about what?” I demanded.  “And either throw the sugar to me or come closer.”

“I don’t know about what,” she said sullenly.  “I’m just scared.”

And for once Maggie and I were in complete harmony.  I, too, was “just scared.”

We were, however, both of us much nearer a solution of our troubles than we had any idea of.  I say solution, although it but substituted one mystery for another.  It gave tangibility to the intangible, indeed, but I can not see that our situation was any better.  I, for one, found myself in the position of having a problem to solve, and no formula to solve it with.