Then, one night, the heat suddenly lifted.  One moment I was sitting on the veranda, lifeless and inert, and the next a cool wind, with a hint of rain, had set the shutters to banging and the curtains to flowing, like flags of truce, from the windows.  The air was life, energy.  I felt revivified.

And something of the same sort must have happened to Miss Emily.  She must have sat up among her pillows, her face fanned with the electric breeze, and made her determination to see me.  Anne Bullard was at work, and she was free from observation.

It must have been nine o’clock when she left the house, a shaken little figure in black, not as neat as usual, but hooked and buttoned, for all that, with no one will ever know what agony of old hands.

She was two hours and a half getting to the house, and the rain came at ten o’clock.  By half after eleven, when the doorbell rang, she was a sodden mass of wet garments, and her teeth were chattering when I led her into the library.

She could not talk.  The thing she had come to say was totally beyond her.  I put her to bed in her own room.  And two days later she died.

I had made no protest when Anne Bullard presented herself at the door the morning after Miss Emily arrived, and, walking into the house, took sleepless charge of the sickroom.  And I made no reference save once to the reason for the tragedy.  That was the night Miss Emily died.  Anne Bullard had called to me that she feared there was a change, and I went into the sickroom.  There was a change, and I could only shake my head.  She burst out at me then.

“If only you had never taken this house!” she said.  “You people with money, you think there is nothing you can not have.  You came, and now look!”

“Anne,” I said with a bitterness I could not conceal, “Miss Emily is not young, and I think she is ready to go.  But she has been killed by her friends.  I wanted to help, but they would not allow me to.”

Toward morning there was nothing more to be done, and we sat together, listening to the stertorous breathing from the bed.  Maggie, who had been up all night, had given me notice at three in the morning, and was upstairs packing her trunk.

I went into my room, and brought back Miss Emily’s confession.

“Isn’t it time,” I said, “to tell me about this?  I ought to know, I think, before she goes.  If it is not true, you owe it to her, I think.”  But she shook her head.

I looked at the confession, and from it to Miss Emily’s pinched old face.

“To whom it may concern:  On the 30th day of May, 1911, I killed a
woman here in this house.  I hope you will not find this until I am
dead. 
          
                                       (Signed)
                                               Emily Benton.”

Anne was watching me.  I went to the mantel and got a match, and then, standing near the bed, I lighted it and touched it to the paper.  It burned slowly, a thin blue semicircle of fire that ate its way slowly across until there was but the corner I held.  I dropped it into the fireplace and watched it turn to black ash.