“Miss Bullard,” I said.  “I would like to have just a short conversation with Miss Emily.  It is about a private matter.  I am sure you will not mind if I ask you—­”

“I shall not go out.”

“Anne!” said Miss Emily sharply.

The girl was dogged enough by that time.  Both dogged and frightened, I felt.  But she stood her ground.

“She is not to be worried about anything,” she insisted.  “And she’s not supposed to have visitors.  That’s the doctor’s orders.”

I felt outraged and indignant, but against the stone wall of the girl’s presence and her distrust I was helpless.  I got up, with as much dignity as I could muster.

“I should have been told that downstairs.”

“The woman’s a fool,” said Anne Bullard, with a sort of suppressed fierceness.  She stood aside as, having said good-by to Miss Emily, I went out, and I felt that she hardly breathed until I had got safely to the street.

Looking back, I feel that Emily Benton died at the hands of her friends.  For she died, indeed, died in the act of trying to tell me what they had determined she should never tell.  Died of kindness and misunderstanding.  Died repressed, as she had lived repressed.  Yet, I think, died calmly and bravely.

I had made no further attempt to see her, and Maggie and I had taken up again the quiet course of our lives.  The telephone did not ring of nights.  The cat came and went, spending as I had learned, its days with Miss Emily and its nights with us.  I have wondered since how many nights Miss Emily had spent in the low chair in that back hall, where the confession lay hidden, that the cat should feel it could sleep nowhere else.

The days went by, warm days and cooler ones, but rarely rainy ones.  The dust from the road settled thick over flowers and shrubbery.  The lettuces wilted, and those that stood up in the sun were strong and bitter.  By the end of August we were gasping in a hot dryness that cracked the skin and made any but cold food impossible.

Miss Emily lay through it all in her hot upper room in the village, and my attempt, through Doctor Lingard, to coax her back to the house by offering to leave it brought only a negative.  “It would be better for her, you understand,” the doctor said, over the telephone.  “But she is very determined, and she insists on remaining where she is.”

And I believe this was the truth.  They would surely have been glad to get rid of me, these friends of Miss Emily’s.

I have wondered since what they thought of me, Anne Bullard and the doctor, to have feared me as they did.  I look in the mirror, and I see a middle-aged woman, with a determined nose, slightly inquisitive, and what I trust is a humorous mouth, for it has no other virtues.  But they feared me.  Perhaps long looking for a danger affects the mental vision.  Anyhow, by the doctor’s order, I was not allowed to call and see Miss Emily again.