I was, for a time that day, strongly influenced by Martin Sprague’s conviction.  It was, for one thing, easier to believe than that Emily Benton had committed a crime.  And, as if to lend color to his assertion, the sunlight, falling onto the dreary bookshelves, picked out and illuminated dull gilt letters on the brown back of a volume.  It was Fox’s Book of Martyrs!

If I may analyze my sensations at that time, they divided themselves into three parts.  The first was fear.  That seems to have given away to curiosity, and that at a later period, to an intense anxiety.  Of the three, I have no excuse for the second, save the one I gave myself at the time—­that Miss Emily could not possibly have done the thing she claimed to have done, and that I must prove her innocence to myself.

With regard to Martin Sprague’s theory, I was divided.  I wanted him to be right.  I wanted him to be wrong.  No picture I could visualize of little old Miss Emily conceivably fitted the type he had drawn.  On the other hand, nothing about her could possibly confirm the confession as an actual one.

The scrap of paper became, for the time, my universe.  Did I close my eyes, I saw it side by side with the inscription in “Fifty years of my Bolivar County,” and letter for letter, in the same hand.  Did the sun shine, I had it in the light, examining it, reading it.  To such a point did it obsess me that I refused to allow Maggie to use a tablet of glazed paper she had found in the kitchen table drawer to tie up the jelly-glasses.  It seemed, somehow, horrible to me.

At that time I had no thought of going back five years and trying to trace the accuracy or falsehood of the confession.  I should not have known how to go about it.  Had such a crime been committed, how to discover it at this late day?  Whom in all her sheltered life, could Miss Emily have murdered?  In her small world, who could have fallen out and left no sign?

It was impossible, and I knew it.  And yet—­

Miss Emily was ill.  The news came through the grocery boy, who came out every day on a bicycle, and teased the cat and carried away all the pears as fast as they ripened.  Maggie brought me the information at luncheon.

“She’s sick,” she said.

There was only one person in both our minds those days.

“Do you mean really ill, or only—­”

“The boy says she’s breaking up.  If you ask me, she caught cold the night she broke in here and took your Paisley shawl.  And if you ask my advice, Miss Agnes, you’ll get it back again before the heirs step in and claim it.  They don’t make them shawls nowadays, and she’s as like as not to will it to somebody if you don’t go after it.”

“Maggie,” I said quietly, “how do you know she has that shawl?”

“How did I know that paper was in the telephone-box?” she countered.

And, indeed, by that time Maggie had convinced herself that she had known all along there was something in the telephone battery-box.