“She is quite the most loved person in the valley,” she said.  “And she loves the place.  It is—­I cannot imagine why she rented the house.  She is far from comfortable where she is.”

After a time I gathered that she suspected financial stringency as the cause, and I tried to set her mind at rest.

“It cannot be money,” I said.  “The rent is absurdly low.  The agent wished her to ask more, but she refused.”

She sat silent for a time, pulling at the fingers of her white silk gloves.  And when she spoke again it was of the garden.  But before she left she returned to Miss Emily.

“She has had a hard life, in a way,” she said.  “It is only five years since she buried her brother, and her father not long before that.  She has broken a great deal since then.  Not that the brother—­”

“I understand he was a great care.”

Mrs. Graves looked about the room, its shelves piled high with the ecclesiastical library of the late clergyman.

“It was not only that,” she said.  “When he was—­all right, he was an atheist.  Imagine, in this house!  He had the most terrible books, Miss Blakiston.  And, of course, when a man believes there is no hereafter, he is apt to lead a wicked life.  There is nothing to hold him back.”

Her mind was on Miss Emily and her problems.  She moved abstractedly toward the door.

“In this very hall,” she said, “I helped Miss Emily to pack all his books into a box, and we sent for Mr. Staley—­the hackman at the station, you know—­and he dumped the whole thing into the river.  We went away with him, and how she cheered up when it was done!”

Martin Sprague’s newspapers arrived the next morning.  They bore a date of two days before the date of the confession, and contained, rather triumphantly outlined in blue pencil, full details of the murder of a young woman by some unknown assassin.  It had been a grisly crime, and the paper was filled with details of a most sensational sort.

Had I been asked, I would have said that Miss Emily’s clear, slightly upturned eyes had never glanced beyond the merest headlines of such journalistic reports.  But in a letter Martin Sprague set forth a precisely opposite view.

“You will probably find,” he wrote, “that the little lady is pretty well fed up on such stuff.  The calmer and more placid the daily life, the more apt is the secret inner one, in such a circumscribed existence, to be a thriller!  You might look over the books in the house.  There is a historic case where a young girl swore she had tossed her little brother to a den of lions (although there were no lions near, and little brother was subsequently found asleep in the attic) after reading Fox’s Book of Martyrs.  Probably the old gentleman has this joke book in his library.”

I put down his letter and glanced around the room.  Was he right, after all?  Did women, rational, truthful, devout women, ever act in this strange manner?  And if it was true, was it not in its own way as mysterious as everything else?